U.K. Farmers Feel Pain of Brexit
BOSTON, England — For four decades, the prime agricultural land that Sarah Pettitt’s family rented near its home produced bumper crops of vegetables. But when post-Brexit migration rules kicked in, curbing recruitment from Eastern Europe, a vital stream of workers dried up in this area close to Britain’s eastern coastline.
Ms. Pettitt said she had to cut production by a fifth. “If you can’t get people to come and harvest it, you’re not going to take your pound notes out of your back pocket and chuck them in the fire,” she said.
Two years after Britain left the European Union’s economic area, ending the ability of the bloc’s citizens to automatically work in Britain, the effects of Brexit are unfolding across the economy. One of the clearest is a shortfall of around 330,000 workers, mostly in less-skilled jobs, including transportation, retail and hospitality, according to the Center for European Reform and U.K. in a Changing Europe, two research groups.
That dearth of workers has hit the food and farming sectors particularly hard. Last year, 22 million pounds’ (about $27 million) worth of fruit and vegetables went unharvested, according to the National Farmers’ Union. In a survey, 40 percent of respondents said they had suffered crop losses, and more than half said they had cut back production.
Ms. Pettitt would welcome more Poles, Latvians or Lithuanians to Boston — “that would be fantastic,” she said. But in the years since Britain voted to quit the E.U., many Eastern Europeans have left the country, and Brexit is making it hard to recruit replacements. And harvesting crops, she said, is a job many Britons have long avoided.
Brexit has meant “a massive drop in immigrant workers,” according to an agricultural recruiting group.
Opinion polls now show that Britons’ sentiments have begun to shift against Brexit, as business owners cite difficulty in finding workers, as well as thorny trade issues and what they describe as onerous paperwork requirements.
Located about 250 kilometers north of London, Boston is a prime example of Britain’s 21st-century population shifts.
When a group of former Communist countries joined the European Union in 2004, Britain was one of only three of the bloc’s nations that immediately opened their labor markets to the new work force. At the time, Poland’s economy was suffering from high unemployment, and hundreds of thousands of Poles moved to Britain.
With many jobs to be had, particularly in farming and food processing, Boston swelled in size after 2004. But the influx of immigrants put pressure on schools and medical services, stoking a local backlash that eventually contributed to a pro-Brexit sentiment in the town a decade later.
But with the onset of Brexit, the situation was basically reversed — now workers from countries like Poland could not come to Britain to work without a visa. At the same time, the economies of countries in Eastern Europe improved, making jobs there more attractive and luring some back home.
“It doesn’t seem to be as advantageous for some East European employees to come over and try and make a living because it’s more competitive to be back in their own country,” said Simon Beardsley, head of the Lincolnshire Chamber of Commerce, a business group, referring to agriculture, food processing and hospitality.