Written evidence submitted by G’s Fresh (LFS0004)

Evidence for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs enquiry into Labour in the Food Chain

1. This evidence is submitted by G’s Fresh, one of the Country’s largest suppliers of salads, vegetables and prepared foods, on a year-round basis, to the UK’s major Supermarkets, Wholesale trade and Food service industry with a turnover in excess of £500 million.

2 The company employs 8,000 thousand employees with c7,000 directly working at horticultural production sites in the UK, Spain, Poland, Czech Republic, Senegal and USA.  In total the company markets product from 13,000 ha hectares (6,000 in the UK) and produces over one billion packs of salads/vegetables annually.

3 Attached to this evidence is a one-page summary giving additional details about the company’s overall activities.

4. Our reason for providing evidence to the Committee is that to sustain UK production and harvesting of our products has, over the last 20 years, meant an increasing dependency on the availability of overseas labour  due to our inability to recruit a season long workforce from within the recent tight UK labour market.

5. Whilst the UK was a member of the European Union there was a plentiful supply of labour, up until the last five years, especially from Eastern Europe.  However, the ending of this arrangement and now the arrival of the proposed Points Based Immigration system has, at a stroke, removed our diminishing flexibility to be able to recruit a guaranteed season long supply of labour, from wherever it could be found.

In response to the Committees specific questions we would comment as follows.

What impact will the Government’s proposed points-based immigration system have on labour in the food supply chain? Which sectors will be most affected by a reduced ability to recruit from abroad?

6. If the Coronavirus epidemic has taught us anything it is that “vital skills” cannot simply be defined by two measures; salary level and formal qualifications.

7. For example, without the work of Hospital Cleaners the NHS would not have been able to respond, as it has done, to the unprecedented demands put upon it during the Covid-19 crisis.  Under the points-based system a person applying for a job requiring such “vital skills” would not be admitted to the UK.  For each element of the food supply chain there will be parallel examples of where a particular skill set will be a vital ingredient in enabling the whole chain to function effectively.

8. However, such skills are often acquired through on the job training and experience but will not ultimately be recognised by either the payment of a high salary or the awarding of a formal professional or academic qualification.

9. G’s work, in both the Agricultural and Horticultural sectors, requires us to be able to blend the contributions of a limited number of highly skilled managers and experts with a much large group of individuals, each with a skill set suited to a range of specific tasks from planting, harvesting and where appropriate packhouse work.  In numbers, these people represent 80% of our workforce. It is recruitment for this group which will be most affected by our reduced ability, and flexibility, to recruit 3,000 seasonal workers from abroad.

Will investment in staff retention, productivity, technology and innovation compensate for the Government not implementing an immigration route for “lower skilled workers”?

10. G’s works hard to retain all trained harvest workers, not least because it is not in our business interests to lose large numbers of the team, in which we have invested substantial sums through training, during any one season.

11. A key element in retaining our overseas staff is to follow ethical employment practices including the provision of quality accommodation and other facilities, thus underscoring the value we attach to the contribution which these colleagues are making to our overall operation.  However, this approach alone, cannot replace the need to have full flexibility to recruit appropriate labour wherever it can be found.  We cannot guarantee that every year the same workers will return thus continued new labour recruitment is a fact of life. 

12. However, our type of labour is in short supply throughout Europe and so we have to ensure that in addition to staff retention measures our overall employment offer is sufficiently attractive that workers will want to come to the UK.

13. In addition, we have also utilised the Settled or Pre-Settled Status Scheme to retain our existing EU based labour force.  Our most recent data confirms that out of 3,000 seasonal workers qualifying for these schemes 1,300 have so far applied for and received Settled or Pre-Settled Status.

14. Whilst this is encouraging it still leaves us 1,700 workers short of the 3,000 colleagues we require.  However, based on the current trend of a 30% return rate this is likely to leave to us still short of 2,600 people. Beneficial as this scheme is, in the short term, its effect is time limited to five years. After that we cannot anticipate what will become of the holders of this Status.

15. As a company we are always seeking ways to improve our productivity and technology as well as to innovate. These matters are a fact of life, in the highly competitive world in which we operate, where over the last decade, real returns have fallen.

16. That said, in the last five years we have focused, on increasing the output of our existing seasonal harvest operations, through improved forms of mechanisation.  For example, a £5 million investment in Iceberg lettuce and Celery production has resulted in productivity increases in excess of 20%.  In addition, we have also been investing in developing and evaluating prototype automated systems for other elements of our salad crop production. 

17. We estimate that if these trials are successful, we might at the end of the next five years, see our way to being able to reduce the numbers of harvest staff required.  However ours is a low margin industry and this inevitably limits the level of overall innovative investment which can be sustained.

18. Welcome, as these developments are, increased production volumes and the need to counter the fall in real returns will mean a continuing dependence on our skilled teams of harvest staff.

What impact has the Seasonal Workers pilot scheme had on agriculture and horticulture? What should be the future of the scheme, including whether it should cover more, or different, agricultural and horticultural sectors?

19. From our standpoint, in the industry, the SWPS and its expansion to 10,000 workers from outside the EU, gave us hope that DEFRA/ Home Office had, at last, begun to acknowledge the industry’s well founded case to have controlled access to a much larger pool of seasonal labour than was first recognised when the scheme began when recruitment  was limited to 2,500.  The NFU calculated that, in total, our industry would require up to 80,000 seasonal workers on an annual basis and we have no reason to disagree with this assessment.

20. Within the G’s group we were disappointed that, as major users of overseas seasonal workers, with a first-class track record, we were not allowed to use the scheme to recruit in our own name.  Instead we did evaluate two pilot arrangements by working with both Concordia and Pro-Force, the scheme’s two Government nominated labour suppliers. We were able to find 160 workers in total. However, in both practical and administrative terms we found the arrangements to be acceptable but sadly we had to incur additional inflated third party cost. 

21. In the future, for the SWPS to become of a real value to the industry, it must rapidly expand and change so that companies like ours can become approved recruiters as well as employers. It will also require numbers available for entry to be expanded to meet the genuine needs of the whole of the Agricultural, Horticultural, Top Fruit and Soft fruit industry.

How many seasonal workers are required in agriculture and horticulture each year, and how can this demand be reasonably met from 2021?

22. As we indicated earlier, we have no reason to disagree with the NFU’s overall assessment of the numbers of seasonal workers which are needed throughout the Agricultural sector.

23. However, we thought it might be of help to the Committee if we laid out our own company’s recent experience in using overseas seasonal labour.

24. The table detailed below shows our labour situation over the last five years.

25. In normal times, the record confirms that, in spite of domestic recruitment exercises we have to date, been unable to recruit, on a regular basis, to recruit a home-based harvest workforce.

26. From 2021 we need a recognition from Government that specialist industries like ours do have a specific and definable skill set requirement. We need to have a well-controlled and administered scheme that allows us to recruit globally the labour we need whilst not adding to levels of permanent immigration.

27. If Government wishes the industry to improve its productivity and investment in new technology, which addresses labour supply issues, it must fully recognise this ambition in the forthcoming Agriculture Bill. Such an acknowledgement would also provide a signal that product pricing, within the industry, should fully reflect a requirement to maintain high levels of investment in new technologies.