UK's seasonal agriculture visa scheme exposes migrant workers to serious risk of abuse: Experts

Migrant agricultural workers in the United Kingdom could face comparable risks to migrant labourers in the Gulf, according to advocacy groups and experts from the UK, Nepal and Bangladesh.

Earlier, the UK government said they will once again be making 45,000 six-month long seasonal work visas available to the horticultural sector next year.

Human rights NGOs and academics expressed concerns last week in a joint letter to UK's Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick, about continued abuse associated with the seasonal worker visa route, introduced in 2019 to address labour shortages in agriculture, which they said failed to meet international standards, reports Fair Square.

In 2023, a total of 45,000 visas are available under the scheme, allowing workers to come to the UK for six months to carry out specific tasks in the horticulture sector.

While the UK government and non-government experts have raised the alarm about the serious risks to workers on the scheme since 2018, 2022 saw a series of media investigations that revealed widespread abuse of migrant workers, including from Nepal, on British farms.

James Lynch, co-director of FairSquare, a UK-based human rights group which has worked extensively on migrant labour abuse in the Gulf, said, "Migrant workers have long been and will for the foreseeable future remain crucial to Britain's agricultural sector. But the British government's design and implementation of this visa scheme leaves them horribly exposed to abuse, in a way that increasingly bears comparison to our research on the Gulf. When responsibility for worker protection is delegated by government to the private sector and when workers lack the full freedom to change employers, this leaves them acutely vulnerable to abusive working and living conditions, with demands for the payment of extortionate and illegal recruitment fees routine."

The British government's position is that to protect migrant workers, it holds a small number of private recruitment firms – known as Scheme Operators – "responsible for managing the recruitment and placement of workers on UK farms, and ensuring their welfare in the UK". The government cannot abdicate its responsibility for enforcing the rights of workers by delegating this to the private sector. 

The UK government places no restrictions on where these operators can recruit from.

In 2023, Scheme Operators unilaterally stopped recruiting from Nepal, in response to reports of worker abuse, with some beginning to recruit from Bangladesh. In its letter, the coalition of organisations and experts told the Home Office that its hands-off approach to regulating the scheme was short-sighted and unsustainable, "failure to address the underlying issues in the Scheme will simply lead to problems encountered in one country being replicated in another country, with another group of at-risk workers, and without avenues for redress in place for workers who have been left in debt by the scheme."

C R Abrar, executive director of the Refugee and Migratory Movements Research Unit, in Bangladesh, said, "With recruitment starting up in Bangladesh, the UK government must urgently use all the levers and tools at its disposal to better protect migrant workers, who we know very well will be vulnerable to exploitative fee charging and poor treatment in the workplace."

The UK has relied on migrant workers to harvest fruit and vegetables for many decades. When the free movement of workers which came with the UK's membership of the EU ended, growers immediately raised concerns about labour shortages. In response, the government introduced a scheme in 2018 to pilot a six-month visa for seasonal agricultural workers, with an initial quota of 2,500 visas. The scheme has grown by 2000% since 2019.