Changes made by the government to skilled visa requirements are making recruitment “very difficult” for the meat industry, processors have warned.
Last month the government changed the rules so all workers coming into the UK on the Skilled Worker visa had to be at RQF 6 (graduate level), removing previously eligible RQF 3-5 occupations.
This means visa applicants now need a higher level of qualification to be eligible for UK work.
The Skilled Worker visa enables the meat industry to bring in butchers and farming labourers to work in the supply chain.
However, the change in eligibility requirements was “making it harder and harder to bring people into work in this country,” said Nick Allen, CEO of the British Meat Processors Association.
It also added significant inflationary pressure, he warned, as workers coming into the sector under the higher qualification requirements had to be paid at a higher rate, which was “adding to the cost of food production”.
It is still unclear what impact the changes will have on those visa holders already in the UK.
“This has just turned the screw even further,” said Allen.
“We were paying more and more and paying quite high prices and now they’ve cut that tap off completely”.
Allen suggested that if it wasn’t for the shortage of supply in the sector, meaning operators were under capacity at the moment, “we’d have some real problems”.
There has also been a consolidation of the industry, which Allen said meant it was harder to recruit UK workers.
There are now only 200 approved abattoirs in England and 41 in Wales and Northern Ireland, which is a significant decline since the 1970s when there were about 2,500.
Abattoirs have therefore got bigger, and they need more labour “but the labour is not to hand”.
“We are making progress with training more British people, but we’re a long, long way from ever being able to source everything we need locally,” he said. Allen explained UK workers typically wanted to live within a short distance of their workplaces and due to moving costs “people can’t just up sticks and move somewhere else because of the job”.
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