CEOs of some of the UK’s biggest meat processors are calling for an urgent meeting with the Home Office to discuss big hikes to the salaries of immigration workers that they fear could undermine their production capacity.
The British Meat Processors Association (BMPA) has warned that the move to increase the threshold for skilled worker visas by £12,500 to £38,700 from April, announced by Mr Cleverly in December as part of his five-point plan to cut immigration, could ‘strangle growth and stoke inflation’ across the economy.
With the implementation date moving ever nearer, there is a sense of desperation amongst the biggest UK meat companies that represent over £8bn in GDP and rely on skilled overseas staff to keep Britain supplied with meat, it said.
“And yet Government is plouging ahead with this seismic policy change without a proper understanding of the damage it will cause,” it said.
BMPA has written to James Cleverly to explain the issues, but said his response ‘makes it clear that he simply doesn’t appreciate the scale of the problem’.
As a result, it has now written to Home Office Minister Tom Pursglove to ask for an ‘urgent meeting’ with BMPA members so they can lay out the damaging consequences of this policy, which it says includes food inflation, withdrawal of investment, weakened domestic food security and lower economic growth.
The BMPA has warned that the £38,700 threshold to employ a recruit from overseas could ’cause havoc’ across factories, offices, pubs, restaurants, warehouses, call centres, shops and more.
“Existing UK workers will have the legal right to demand a similar salary uplift, completely distorting the standard market rate for jobs across the UK,” BMPA aaid.
“Despite current competitive rates of pay that are well above the official Government ‘going rates’, companies (not just in the meat industry) find it impossible to fill all their vacancies from the pool of people in the UK, who are either not willing, not able, or not in the right location to take up these positions. So, we need migrants.
“If companies continue to bring in overseas workers, British consumers will be hit with steeply rising costs from some of the key food, retail, hospitality and manufacturing sectors and the UK will become less competitive on the international export market.
“A more likely scenario is that it will go the other way. We’re hearing from businesses that filling these vacancies will become completely unviable under the new rule. If they can recruit neither British nor overseas workers they’re left with one choice – contract their business and reduce the amount of food they produce.
“This would be anti-growth for UK Plc. and damaging for the economy. It would also dent our food security and spark fresh animal welfare issues as animals start backing-up on farms with not enough processing workers to handle the volume.”
BMPA is calling for the Government to include butchers on the new Immigration Salary List which would reduce the salary floor to £30,960, which would still be more than most British butchers are getting paid now.