Examination of Witness (Questions 200-218)
MR PAUL
TEMPLE AND
MR JAMES
DAVIES
3 FEBRUARY 2009
Q200 Martin Salter: Could you justify
for me your evidence that you have just given, that they are paid
well above the minimum wage? How do you define well above? At
the moment it is one pence. Can you get it up a bit?
Mr Davies: Most seasonal workers
are employed on a piece-rate work system, where they are paid
for the amount of work: the kilos they pick, the metres they plant.
That has to be linked to the legislative rates, so at least they
are being paid that as a minimum. The vast majority would earn
10-20% over those rates. Indeed, on some farms they are earning
as much as £7.50 in a standard hour of work.
Q201 Bob Russell: Is it not the truth
there that you are being screwed by the supermarkets?
Mr Davies: There is an element
of that, yes. I heard the lady before speaking about care homes.
Ultimately, wages in soft fruit makes up some 45% of the cost
of growing the crop. Unless you are getting more from the crop—and
Paul might be able to say something here, but I think that strawberries
are now worth about the same as they were towards the end of the
1990s, whereas the minimum wage has nearly doubled.
Mr Temple: That is a particularly
relevant point. We are in a competitive market-place. We are challenging
agriculture to be increasingly in a competitive market-place.
If we do not solve this particular issue and we do not overcome
the problems of labour, it starts off with issues like not being
able to pick at the frequency, not to establish the quality that
is required and deliver to the price that is expected, and then
it leads into a simple question by these growers: Do I grow this
crop? Do I produce this livestock? For some of them now they are
faced with the decision of not doing this. This is entirely at
a point when food production and food security is important.
Q202 Bob Russell: Last year some
producers decided that the best thing was not to pick the crop.
Mr Temple: That is a real and
genuine concern. When that happens, if a grower cannot see a return,
the following year he will make the decision of whether he grows
that crop or not.
Bob Russell: It is short-termism at its
worse, Chairman.
Chairman: Indeed, Mr Russell.
Q203 Patrick Mercer: Mr Davies, how
has the falling value of the pound affected your sector's ability
to recruit?
Mr Davies: It has impacted on
us greatly. Candidates that we were managing to find in countries
such as Poland and Slovakia are now looking to go into Germany
or into Spain. If they want to pick fruit then they can go to
Spain and earn €5 an hour, which is not a massive difference
from the £6 or £7 we are paying here. Very recently
Spain, Greece and Hungary have lifted their work restrictions
on Romanians and Bulgarians, and Denmark is due to do it in May.
Spain has very strong links with Romania so a lot are there. Although
we are recruiting quite steadily in Romania, we expect this to
have a very big impact on capacity.
Q204 Tom Brake: Is there any evidence
that the economic downturn might mean, for instance, that Polish
workers, who used to work in your industry but took jobs elsewhere,
might be coming back into your industry and helping the position
you are in.
Mr Davies: I have heard anecdotally
that that is happening, yes. I will use an example of one specific
farm, if I may. They have a total requirement of 350 people through
their calendar year. I will touch on the British nationals: of
those, six people are British, and they have just had eight people
return to them having lost their jobs in other sectors. Although
that has meant that we have moved their SAWS allocation of people
to help plug the hole later in the year, it is really only filling
a hole that (a) is there and (b) is growing because the Polish
people who we would have newly recruited are much tougher to find
to come into the country.
Q205 Ms Buck: With unemployment in
the UK, what is your analysis of why you cannot recruit to your
jobs?
Mr Davies: The temporary nature
of the work. If we look at a lot of the people who have recently
become employed, they are in the wrong place and they have the
wrong skills. They are coming out of the finance sector.
Q206 Ms Buck: I was wondering what
the skill analysis was for picking fruit.
Mr Temple: As somebody who is
a vegetable grower, we have employed people for seasonal work
and, as the years have progressed, because there have been other
job opportunities, possibly higher expectations of what they should
be doing work-wise, the nature of this work has not been something
that people have considered for whatever reason. We were particularly
grateful for migrant workers to fill a gap where we literally
could not find people to man the equipment, and the quality of
staff that we got improved what we were able to do. In today's
recessionary backdrop, it offers a new opportunity, possibly through
the new skills training or the land-based diplomas that have been
put through schools, to put in front of students and younger people
what happens in horticulture and agriculture and the opportunities
for skilled, unskilled, semiskilled workers in the future. But
that will not bear fruit for several years to come.
Q207 Chairman: The evidence we received
this morning from Mr Cridland is that workers have returned to
Poland and Hungary and other countries. Are you telling us that
this is now reversing and that some are coming back?
Mr Davies: No. I think, generally,
that trend is correct. They are going home or they are going to
other euro countries. We are finding that a very small element
of people here who maybe had moved into the construction industry,
have lost their jobs there and are now looking to move back into
farms. However, that is quite small.
Q208 Mrs Cryer: Mr Temple, next year,
at the end of 2010, the Government is hoping to end the Seasonal
Agricultural Workers Scheme. Do you believe that tier 3 of the
points-based system, which is aimed at the low skilled labour,
will be up and running in time to take over from the Seasonal
Agricultural Workers Scheme?
Mr Temple: We have real concerns
that once SAWS ends we do not have something suitable in place
to cover it. One of the things that strikes us is that the kind
of labour we require is, for large part, seasonal labour. The
tier 5 element is something that offers an attraction, because
you find people who are skilled, hardworking, willing to come
and quickly want to return back, and that fits the profile of
worker more, in some cases, than maybe tier 3.
Q209 Mrs Cryer: Are you pressing
to carry on using the seasonal worker scheme if either tier 3
or tier 5 is not ready?
Mr Temple: Yes. We would certainly
want that to continue unless there was something that we felt
was suitable in place. I think it is important, when changes are
made, that the proper impact of any changes is understood before
they are applied. Following the EU Directives that are going through
could be a useful way of seeing the future progression.
Q210 Mrs Dean: Mr Temple, how much
low-skilled labour under tier 3 would the agriculture and horticulture
industries need to recruit? With perhaps less employment opportunities
for students in other areas or other occupations, do you think
there is an opening for more students to come back to fruit picking,
which they used to do in years gone by?
Mr Temple: In terms of the numbers,
as has been mentioned the number of 5,000 was mentioned as a shortfall.
We have our own survey and we are more than willing to pass details
of our own survey forward, because it identifies what our own
members are finding on the ground. I think that is very important.
We are concerned with students coming in if they are required
to have £1,600 of savings before they can enter the country—
Q211 Mrs Dean: I meant UK students.
Mr Temple: No, this would be migrant
students. That might be an obstacle to students coming in.
Q212 Mrs Dean: Would there be an
opportunity for our UK students?
Mr Temple: The opportunity for
UK students has been there every year. It is a case of: Are people
taking these jobs up? That is a real challenge. That is why we
have the migrant workforce that we have, because students, for
whatever reason, have not been attracted to it. To draw attention
to the working environment, the working environment is obviously
a harder one. It is manual labour in many circumstances. It can
be outdoors, but increasingly it is poly-tunnels. Most employers
now fully understand the need to protect and enhance the working
conditions, and certainly not to put the workers at risk. It is
not the working in the conditions that many people have in their
mind. I think that is a real obstacle for us to communicate, that
the working conditions are not quite as difficult, but it also
shows the problems we have. Agriculture and horticulture is a
unique area of work and people can quite easily move from outdoor
work to indoor work, but you tend to find that people do not quickly
migrate back the other way.
Q213 Gwyn Prosser: Mr Davies, I would
like to ask you about tier 2 issues. How confident are your members
that under tier 2 you will be able to attract sufficient recruits
to meet your needs?
Mr Davies: We are an agency that
provides predominantly low-skilled labour: the pickers, the packers,
the bottom end of the job spectrum. We do not work directly with
tier 2. However, I have spoken to people who have managed to make
it work for dairy jobs, the jobs where salaries are up in the
high £20,000/ early £30,000 sort of bracket, and they
are finding it to work. However, I have no experience of using
it myself.
Q214 Gwyn Prosser: Do your colleagues
have any view over the way points are allocated for tier 2? Could
it be improved or reformed to make it better for the industry?
Mr Davies: I do not know.
Q215 Mr Clappison: On tier 2, we
have been talking about seasonal workers, workers who come here
for a season, for a temporary time, but also there have been migrant
workers coming in to fill positions on a more permanent basis
from the European Union and from elsewhere—as, for example,
stockmen looking after stock: pigs, cattle, milking herds and
so forth. Do you have any evidence as to how many of those jobs
are being filled from outside the UK by non UK workers?
Mr Temple: No, we have no specific
experience. All I can give you is the anecdotal evidence as I
travel around. It is a changing situation. It varies from part
to part of the country. In Northumberland, for example, they still
have, reasonably few problems finding local stockmen to work on
their farms. If you go down to the South East of the country,
they have tremendous problems. However, that could rapidly change.
I was talking to a dairy farmer in the West Riding. Three years
ago he put an advert in for a dairy worker and got nobody; he
put in an advert recently and had 21 people applying for that
job. That shows that there is a growing awareness that maybe agriculture
is something for people to consider. It brings us back into that
tier 2, and qualifications: Have we got the people qualified and
capable of doing that?
Q216 Mr Clappison: I am not talking
about tier 2. I am not just talking about the new people, coming
mainly from the Eastern European countries to work here, but about
people from outside the EU to do these jobs as well. Is that right,
if we are talking about tier 2 jobs? People can come anyway from
within the EU, so there is no point in talking about the points-based
system.
Mr Temple: These people, in my
experience, especially in that tier 2 period, are EU workers.
Q217 Mr Clappison: What seems strange
to me—and I declare an interest as someone who comes from
a farming background, who still has a small interest in this—is
that years ago the agriculture sector was much larger than it
is today. There were far more people working on the land, I suspect
in more difficult conditions, and without the benefit of machinery,
yet nearly all those jobs were occupied by UK citizens.
Mr Temple: Yes.
Q218 Mr Clappison: Why is it that
now, today, we need to have so many people coming from outside
the UK?
Mr Temple: Quite simply it is
the economic situation. The work rates and employment rates that
go into agriculture are out of sync with many other industries,
or have been in the past. You do need to have a reasonable degree
of skill in certain categories of work. Now these workers are
readily in demand in other sectors. The building sector over the
last five years has taken an enormous number of agricultural workers
away from agricultural work, because quite simply they can work
a fewer number of hours for more money. That was up until this
particular period of recession. We might see a change.
Chairman: Thank you very much for coming
to give evidence to us today. That was extremely helpful. We will
write to you about a couple of other points which we will be discussing
on the operation of the points-based system. If you have any information
that you wish to send us, please do so.
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