Veg packers’ pay rockets to £20 an hour

vegeTABLe growers have been forced to raise pay for workers by up to 60 per cent to almost £20 an hour to combat a chronic labour shortage.

Coronavirus and Brexit have been blamed for driving away thousands of foreign pickers and packers while not enough Britons apply for the jobs.

Bosses are estimated to need up to 500,000 workers across the food supply sector, from pickers in the fields to packers, processors and drivers. The sharp rise in wages is expected to feed through to shelf prices.

Details of the crisis were revealed by Simon Naylor, of Naylor Farms in Lincolnshire – the uK’s largest grower of cabbages. He emailed customers: ‘To keep people we have raised wages by 60 per cent to nearly £20 per hour for packhouse staff and from this week we are having to pay them to turn up at £20 a day for a weekday and £30 for weekends. This now is unsustainable.’

He added: ‘yes a lot of us voted out [on Brexit] and now we have this problem!!!’