Former Defra secretary George Eustice has reiterated calls for the Seasonal Worker Scheme to be taken out of the Home Office’s hands and put solely into the control of Defra.
The scheme, which is currently run by both the Home Office and Defra, has been mired in controversy after a scheme operator failed to sue the Home Office for wrongful suspension.
Eustice has reiterated that it “makes much more sense for the whole scheme to be transferred” to Defra as “they’re the ones who understand it. They’re the ones with a relationship with industry”.
He added: “The Home Office don’t really understand the issues and don’t understand agriculture, and certainly in my time, it was always Defra officials that had to do all of the heavy lifting anyway.”
He said the scheme could easily be brought under the control of Defra using a machinery of government change which would move the officials sitting in the Home Office across to Defra. He added that this would allow the Home Office to contribute but “they wouldn’t be in control of the policy”.
“In my experience, Defra officials were much closer to the detail and practicalities of the scheme but had to constantly fight a rearguard action to get the Home Office machine to understand things adequately, and that caused terrible delays in decision making,” he said.
He also called for the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority to be brought back under Defra, which it had been until 2014.
“The Home Office haven’t managed it very well, and have almost, I think, forgotten that it existed, and they keep recreating functions internally and talking about things that the GLAA was set up to address,” he said.
Read more:
-
Labour provider ‘ruined’ after seasonal worker legal wrangle
-
Legal battle over Seasonal Worker scheme exposes rule flaws
-
Why the UK seasonal labour worker scheme still isn’t working
It comes as the Home Office has been accused of being “misrepresentative” and “intentionally misleading” by MD of labour operator Ethero Gareth Hughes, in his long-running legal case against the government department.
The company was suspended as a SWS operator following a period of poor weather in spring 2024, which left workers unable to work on Varfell Farm in Cornwall. Ethero said it had alerted the government to the issues and sought advice, but was suspended four weeks later, without receiving any guidance.
It sued the Home Office over this decision but lost in the High Court last year. Ethero then submitted an application for permission to appeal its case last autumn, which was dismissed last week.
Ethero’s legal challenge hinged on four main points, including claims that the SWS rules – particularly the 32-hour minimum work requirement – were “unclear and caused widespread confusion”.
Eustice explained that while he thought this rule was “doable” when the scheme was being created, he “wasn’t keen on too many of these restrictions”.
However, they were required “to get [the scheme] through a Home Office that was just obsessed with immigration numbers”, and concerns were that without these rules the scheme would be used as a loophole for legal immigration.
Eustice added that there was some logic to the rule, as if people came to the UK to work and there was none to be had it could be “potentially problematic”. However, it “violated, in some ways, the principle of casual agriculture labour”, he said.
He has suggested that there are two ways in which to address the problem of weather-induced labour gaps. The first is to have a force majeure measure that would offer leeway to an employer in the case of an exceptional circumstance which mean employees couldn’t work, and the second a type of insurance to underwrite the situation.
The Home Office was approached for comment.
No comments yet