Almost half of UK food growers and manufacturers have rationalised or reduced their output owing to labour shortages, a new survey shows.
The Association of Labour Providers' (ALP) has published the findings today, and is calling on the government to take urgent action to fix UK labour shortages.
The May 2022 Food Labour Market Survey found that 49% of growers and food manufacturers have cut down on their output due to a lack of workforce.
And over three quarters (77%) of these businesses are experiencing shortages of lower and unskilled workers, with 45% stating that these shortages are chronic.
The ALP, the trade body representing businesses that source the UK’s food workers, has written to ministers asking for "immediate and urgent collaboration" to ease the shortages.
It follows a statement delivered by Defra farming minister Victoria Prentis on Wednesday (25 May) in a Westminster debate on recruitment support for the agriculture sector.
She said: “Indeed, we have ambitions in Defra to increase food production—particularly in areas such as fruit and veg, where we traditionally have low levels.”
However, ALP chief executive, David Camp said the UK's food and farming workforce was 'often taken for granted'.
He said it was time for the government to fix 'the biggest issue' affecting UK food production. “The UK food and farming workforce keeps our nation fed,” he said.
“Hailed as ‘Britain’s Food Heroes’ during the pandemic, this workforce is often taken for granted; that is until supermarket shelves run empty.
"Whilst we welcome the ambition of the minister, with 1.26m people unemployed and 1.3m job vacancies, there are simply not enough workers for essential sectors like ours."
As a food business put it when responding to the ALP’s survey: “If the government wants to reduce food imports and strengthen the resilience of home-produced produce, then it will have to change policy and allow producers access to sufficient labour to get the job done.
“The present crisis in production is entirely due to government policy and if left unchanged will lead to very large increases in imports and an equal reduction in home produced food. It is a simple choice.”
The British Retail Consortium has also warned that if labour shortages were not resolved soon “we will start to see production being lost from the UK and being offshored, and then imported back into the UK”.
It added that labour shortages “threaten to shrink the sector permanently with a chain reaction of wage rises and price increases reducing competitiveness, leading to food production being exported abroad and increased imports.”
And a House of Commons Committee report published in April 2022 concluded that “the UK’s largest manufacturing sector faces permanent damage if the government fails to address the lack of workers.”
The committee's MPs recognised “a need, at least in the short term, to increase the overall supply of labour through revised immigration measures to address the current crisis.”
They also advised that “the government must radically shift its attitude and work together with the sector to devise solutions that speedily help address the problems it faces.”
What is the ALP calling for?
The trade body is asking the government for strategic collaboration with the food industry to address labour shortages around a five-point plan:
• A national plan to attract domestic resident workers to the UK food industry
• Immediate release of this season’s 10,000 agreed seasonal worker visas and work to identify the actual number needed for this and future years
• Extend the seasonal worker route to other key sectors such as meat and poultry processing
• Match Skilled Worker visa language requirements with those needed for the job
• Improve the processing speed of all worker visa routes
