Fruit pickers are being flown up to 6,000 miles to the UK from Barbados, Nepal, Tajikistan, Kenya, the Philippines and elsewhere because farms cannot find British or European workers.
More than 16,000 labourers from 37 countries were recruited by horticultural farmers this year on seasonal workers’ visas, according to an analysis of Home Office data. In 2020, just 7,000 workers from 14 countries came to Britain.
Farmers said this was a sign of their ever-increasing struggle to recruit enough workers, with some crops left to rot in fields this year and growers forced to consider scaling back production.
In 2019, the government began a seasonal workers’ visa pilot scheme that allowed fruit and vegetable farmers to recruit labourers from anywhere in the world. This
