Only two out of 10,000 applicants for fruit picking jobs at UK farms this summer were British, according to recruitment company Concordia.
The damning figures confirm the UK’s almost total reliance on foreign seasonal workers to pick its produce, with the NFU also reporting that only one per cent of the 60,000 seasonal workers hired in 2017 were British.
Stephanie Maurel, chief executive of Concordia, which supplies workers to around 200 British farms, told the Washington Post: “We've had two applications out of 10,000. It's statistically quite damning.”
She explained that the physical demands of the job and the fact that farms are not located in cities with high unemployment rates were the main reasons why Brits didn’t want to take the jobs.
It is often impossible for people to afford to reach the farms for work unless they live nearby, Maurel said, however European workers tend to live in mobile homes either on site or nearby while they work.
The government has remained silent on how it will address labour shortages and horticulture funding beyond Brexit, prompting NFU horticulture chairman Ali Capper to express her frustration.
“My gloves are about to come off and I’m running out of patience,” she told an audience at Fruit Focus in July.
Capper added that she was having “sleepless nights” at the thought of losing half her workforce in the event of a no-deal Brexit without free movement of labour.
