Surrey soft-fruit grower Hall Hunter Partnership (HHP) is embroiled in a planning dispute for its plans to build 25 new caravans to house 150 extra seasonal workers.
The development would see 0.54 hectares at the company’s Tuesley Farm, near Godalming, converted into caravans, pedestrian paths, a refuse store and a laundry portacabin.
Extra accommodation for seasonal workers is “urgently required”, HHP said, to address increased harvesting pressure at the farm due to higher volumes, and to cater for the farm’s switch from strawberries into more labour-intensive blueberries.
The company also cited modern growing techniques and new blueberry varieties that have intensified yields, as well as the need to attract seasonal workers who have a choice about where they work, as reasons why the expansion is needed.
“The provision of high-quality accommodation in the form of an additional caravan site is a critical part of the employment offer made by HHP to its harvesting workforce in what is becoming an ever more competitive employment market,” a statement in the planning application submitted to Waverley Borough Council said.
An objection from Bushbridge Parish Council said it is struggling to accept that there is a need for more workers and called into question what it called an “almost magical” increase in the company’s blueberry yields.
“HPP production methods have always been intense and to our knowledge no major changes have taken place over the last few years,” the council said. “HPP has had productive blueberry bushes at Tuesley Farm since at least 2007, their bushes are in the main now fully mature… their yields are therefore more likely to be stable at best.”
But in a response sent to Waverly Borough Council, HPP said blueberry tonnage has actually increased twelve-fold between 2008 and 2016.
“A number of assumptions made by the Parish Council regarding blueberry cropping are not appropriate to the system employed at Tuesley Farm because they are unaware of the many techniques… employed by growers,” the company said.
The council said that Google Earth shows that Tuesley Farms houses 64 caravans and claimed that, if the farm employs 300 seasonal workers with a stated occupancy of six people per caravan, there is a spare capacity for 86 more workers.
HPP said it “completely refutes” this assertion and said the site has no spare capacity. The labour shortfall at the farm is expected to increase, HPP said, and the proposed additional caravan site will address this issue.
Some local residents objected on the grounds of increased strain on local infrastructure and roads. One resident wrote that: “Tuesley Farm is an industrial food processing plant, and any futher expansion will put even greater strain on an already over-stretched infrastructure, and despoil the landscape.”
HPP maintains that the application is to cope with a labour shortfall experienced by Tuesley Farm over the past few seasons, and which is expected to continue.
