YESTERDAY the first flight full of horticultural workers landed in the UK in order for them to help out businesses in the rural countryside by picking and packing fruit and veg so that the UK food chain doesn’t break down at this time of crisis.

However while many of these businesses welcome the flights, one owner of a Recruitment company called ‘Fasttrack Recruitment Worldwide’ based on Spain’s Costa Del Sol has launched a scathing attack on such a move to keep these businesses fully staffed.

The company’s director Adam Brown and the company itself took to Social Media once the flights were made public and as a result his comments soon gathered interest.

Having made contact with Mr Brown, who has over 20 years’ experience within the Recruitment Industry we realised that his passion on trying to help the UK unemployed quickly came across. He said:

“Throughout my career I have dealt with fruit and veg growing companies who require such workers during certain times of the year. However you never hear the reality of why farmers always insist on non-UK workers, it’s because farmers would have many caravans based on their land in which non-UK workers would then be accommodated. These workers are then charged rent by the farmers for the accommodation, so then the farmer can offset the rent against the wage outlay.”

He then went onto say “Local unemployed workers don’t require accommodation and as agencies are sometimes used by such companies to get around discrimination laws by instructing them on their preferred type of worker, the amount of times farmers would instruct me to only take on non-UK based workers simply because of their hunger for accommodation profits was just too much in the end and I instructed my staff to stop working with such clients a few years ago.” When asked if his profits were damaged by such a call he replied “Morals mean more to me than money.”

During the 2015 election and the EU referendum the issue regarding fruit and veg pickers on such farms become a hugely controversial issue but this side of things was never raised by politicians of any party so having mentioned that to Mr Brown he responded by saying:

“Unfortunately the narrative has never focused on the reality, politicians just seem to be concentrating on the concerns of farmers in order to get votes but since my online remarks the media are finally starting to take notice of what is really behind the farmers’ reasoning for wanting these type of workers, but it’s just a shame it’s taken something as serious as Coronavirus for them to sit up and start listening.”