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Industry chief urges government to relax immigration restrictions

The food and drink sector is urging the government to relax labour market restrictions to help ease “short-term” staff shortages.

Giving evidence before the government’s Migration Advisory Committee (MAC), Jack Matthews, chief executive of food and drink sector skills council Improve, said the immigration quota placed on Bulgarian and Romanian workers was “inconsistent when matched against need” and unfairly penalised certain food and drink sectors.

Mr Matthews was giving evidence in the wake of recent research published by Improve which revealed that workers from EU states such as Poland and Slovakia, who are not subject to the same restrictions as those placed on Bulgarian and Romanian nationals, were starting to head home in large numbers.

He said: “Just under one in five workers in the food and drink industry are classified as migrants, with the majority originating from the so-called ‘A8’ group of eastern European countries admitted to the EU in 2004. That is a relatively heavy reliance on migrant labour, but it stems from basic need - food and drink companies simply haven’t been able to source workers in the numbers they need at home for some years now.

“We have asked the government to look again at the rules affecting Bulgarian and Romanian workers because they are still applying to come to this country in large numbers. However, their availability to companies is restricted by what many in the food and drink industry see as arbitrary, unbalanced immigration quotas.”

The government is obliged to inform the European Commission whether it intends to extend its immigration restrictions on Bulgarian and Romanian nations beyond January 2009 in preparation for the scrapping of all migration quotas across the EU in 2011. The MAC has been hearing evidence from representatives of the food processing, agriculture, hospitality, construction and social care sectors in lieu of its decision.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .