Photo: PA
Lee Anderson has backed calls from a Tory peer to move jobless people to the countryside to help pick crops.
The deputy Conservative Party chairman supported proposals from Baroness Buscombe who suggested the unemployed could be transported to rural areas to pick crops in areas suffering a shortage of labour.
The Tory peer said ‘several million people’ who could work should be encouraged to find jobs in areas such as Herefordshire where there are not enough pickers.
National Farmers Union leader Minette Batters said she would ‘absolutely support’ the proposal because the UK was increasingly relying on labour from as far afield as the Philippines to pick crops.
Anderson has also supported the plans.
According to the latest ONS data, 1.3 million people in the UK were unemployed in December 2022: an unemployment rate of 3.7 per cent, lower than any point since the 1970s.
Baroness Buscombe told the House of Lords Agricultural Committee: “We have several million people in this country at the moment who are capable of working who are unemployed and on benefits.
“Surely it would be easier to move some of them for example, to Hereford, and cheaper, albeit on a seasonal basis, than to bring people from much further afield.”
Last year, the government’s Pick For Britain campaign was scrapped after just 12 months after ministers spent £30,000 promoting the scheme to lure British volunteers to save the country’s crops during the Covid crisis.
Tim Farron of the Liberal Democrats said at the time: “British farmers produce some of the best food in the world, yet the Tories seem happy for another summer of fruit and veg rotting in our fields – despite Putin’s war in Ukraine threatening to starve us of food from abroad.
“It was always reprehensible for Conservative Ministers to cause these shortages by making it harder for British farmers to recruit the workers they need. It’s even more unforgivable that they still don’t have anything approaching a plan to solve them.
“Ministers must get a grip or start looking for new career opportunities of their own.”
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