Britain’s food production depends on seasonal migrant labour from the EU. What will happen to those workers after Brexit? And how will it change the industry?
On 24 June last year, the few hundred residents of a temporary village, hidden from view in the middle of a West Sussex soft fruit farm, received letters. They were signed by David Kay, the managing director of the Hall Hunter Partnership, a business that grows 10% of the UK’s strawberries, 19% of its raspberries and a whacking 42% of its blueberries across thousands of acres, of both glasshouses and polytunnels. The recipients were his seasonal workforce, some of the 3,000 pickers from Bulgaria, Romania and elsewhere who come here each year to get the harvest in, and without whom the business would simply not exist.
“I wanted them to know that in the face of the vote for Brexit we would hang together as a family,” he says now, standing amid the mobile homes his workers live in during the summer months. The dwellings come dressed with satellite dishes pointed at news channels in Bulgaria, and pylons delivering high-speed wifi. Some have planted gardens. Tesco Direct delivers their groceries; coaches take them out on excursions.“I’m responsible for both a fruit farm and 2,100 beds,” Kay says. “That morning I met a lot of very sad and confused workers. For me, personally, it was a shock.”
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