Farmers: Drop English visa rule to help pig crisis

Farms set to kill and burn 100,000 pigs in butchers’ visa crisis SEPTEMBER 5, 2021

FARMERS are demanding that visa rules that require foreign vets and butchers to speak English be dropped to help tackle chronic staff shortages and mass culling of pigs.

The National Farmers’ Union (NFU) last night called on Ministers to temporarily relax the rules so 15,000 extra workers can be brought to Britain on short-term visas to plug a meat production crisis.

The Government is currently offering just 1,000 temporary visas for butchers. Staff shortages in abattoirs have forced pig farmers to start culling hundreds of animals which will not be able to enter the food chain.

Meat industry trade bodies say that it is already too late to prevent some disruption to supplies to supermarkets and fear as many as 120,000 pigs could be killed and then burned. Minette Batters, president of the NFU, told The Mail on Sunday: ‘We want the required level of English to be lowered so there is a wider pool of workers who can come here and help to resolve this crisis.

‘Recruitment agencies in South America are already skill-testing people and they could come here quickly if the language barrier was removed. We know that farmers are already killing pigs on farms. At the moment it is in the hundreds, not the thousands but it is a ticking time-bomb. There has got to be solutions within days.’ Pig farming is the latest industry to be hit by a lack of skilled workers. A shortage of HGV drivers has already led to panic-buying at petrol stations.

Farmers have also warned huge quantities of fruit and vegetables have been left to rot in the fields or have had to be destroyed because there is no one to pick them. Research by the NFU suggests 500,000 of the four million people who work across the farm-to-fork supply chain have left the industry during the pandemic and more than a third of vacancies for horticultural workers have been unfilled.

According to the Office for National Statistics, 27 per cent of food and accommodation firms have reported lower than normal stock levels while a report by accountants Grant Thornton found more than 500,000 vacancies across food and drink businesses.

The Government has argued that industries must pay British workers more rather than rely on cheaper foreign labour, but businesses say that will take too long to prevent a supply crisis.

A Government spokesman said: ‘We understand the challenges the pig industry has faced because of the pandemic, labour shortages, accessing Co2 supplies, and reduction in exports to the Chinese market. We are working closely with the sector during this time.’