We won’t be fall guys for Christmas shortages

With the shortfall in both permanent and seasonal workers across Scotland’s food and farming sector standing at crisis level, the industry needs to get in first before the UK Government makes it the fall-guy for Christmas shortages.

head of Scotland Food and Drink, James Withers

As the scale of the threat currently facing the entirety of the UK’s food supply chain was laid bare at a cross-sector Zoom meeting organised by NFU Scotland on Thursday evening, head of Scotland Food and Drink, James Withers, warned that while the UK Government’s concessions on short term working visas were all but useless, a massive policy of distraction was likely to be launched by the administration: “We saw warning signs of this approach last week when the head of the Road Haulage Association was blamed for causing panic buying, claiming he leaked details to the press of a meeting which he hadn’t even attended.”

And he warned that while the poorly conceived recovery visas were unlikely to attract workers to the UK and delays to the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme had limited numbers, the Government was likely to spin poor uptake with the food and farming sector not making the most of the help which had been offered – setting it up as the fall guy for the inevitable Christmas shortages.

Withers said that staff shortages had been on the cards for some time but the Brexit agreement, which he said was simply a ‘No Deal’ without some of the tariffs, followed by Covid had seen a huge acceleration in the workforce decline: “We have been talking with government ministers and warning them of the likely consequences of limiting access to foreign workers since the EU referendum – but whenever discussions get round to mentioning Brexit, the doors are immediately closed.”

Adding that if the UK Government didn’t believe that Brexit had played a significant role in the current shortfall it was either “in denial or wired to the moon”, Withers said that, having spoken to many of the key players in the food processing sector, current backlogs meant there was no way supplies could approach normal levels over the festive period.

Head of the English NFU horticulture sector, Ali Capper, suggested that the UK Government’s plan was to drive both wages and inflation up to make paying back the massive Government Covid debts easier.

NFU Scotland president, Martin Kennedy, spoke of the hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of food and produce which had gone to waste on Scottish farms due to worker shortages, warning that without urgent action from government, the crisis would extend long after Christmas: “It’s especially galling as the public support for home-grown has soared since Covid, and just like the fuel shortages we have the demand on one side and the supply on the other, but huge workforce shortages in the middle are stopping the two joining up.”

And he called for a swift response to a major survey on labour shortages which is underway to back an all-industry campaign to force the Government to take meaningful steps to ease the situation.