Firms seek visa review to deal with staff shortages
COVID RULES ADD TO BREXIT-RELATED LABOUR ISSUES FOR POULTRY PRODUCERS
A LEADING Asian businessman has joined other industry leaders in calling for revised immigration rules to ease a staff crunch post Brexit.
Ranjit Singh Boparan, the multimillionaire founder of the 2 Sisters Food Group, said recently the “pingdemic” – which forced large numbers of healthy workers to self-isolate after being “pinged” by NHS Test and Trace – increased troubles for an industry battling Brexit-related labour shortages, the Guardian reported last week.
Brexit “acutely reduced available workers across the food sector” with entry level jobs hardest to fill, 2 Sisters said. Of its 16,000-member workforce, the majority of whom work in its chicken and ready-meal production facilities, 15 per cent of jobs remained unfilled, the report said.
2 Sisters is a subsidiary of Boparan Holdings Limited that deals in frozen retail poultry cutting operations.
“The critical labour issue alone means we walk a tightrope every week at the moment,” said Boparan. Without government help, food waste would rocket “simply because it cannot be processed or delivered”, he added.
The poultry industry in the UK employs more than 40,000 people, but there are nearly 7,000 vacancies. This means some chicken producers have reduced the size of their product ranges and lowered weekly output by up to 10 per cent, a letter from industry leaders to home secretary Priti Patel said.
UK poultry producers have also warned that serious staff shortages caused by Brexit and exacerbated by the pandemic could lead to less availability of turkeys at Christmas.
Paul Kelly, the managing director of KellyBronze, which produces hand-plucked, free-range turkeys, said, “There will be a massive shortage because companies cannot risk hatching turkeys and pushing them on the farm if they can’t get workers to do the job.”
“It would be financial suicide. Turkey after Christmas Day is worth nothing,” he added.
Earlier this month, fast-food chain Nando’s was forced to temporarily close more than 40 outlets in Britain, around 10 per cent of its restaurants, after staff shortages hit its chicken supply chain. In response to customers asking why their local Nando’s was closed, the South African chain said on Twitter “the UK supply chain is having a bit of a (night)mare right now.”
It added it was running limited services in some stores because staff needed to complete isolation periods. That requirement should ease after the government relaxed the rules for those fully vaccinated.
Online supermarket Ocado said in July that its staff had also worked with suppliers in order to keep operations moving.
The Nando’s news comes a week
after rival fast-food group KFC said it was struggling to stock some items or use its normal packaging due to disruptions in recent weeks.
However, the Unite union said the issue was neither Brexit nor Covid, but the “terrible pay and working conditions that make the
meat processing industry one of the worst places to work in the UK”.
“The conditions are awful, and the pay is worse,” said Bev Clarkson, its national officer for food, drink and agriculture.
Patel’s response to the letter is still awaited.