On the face of it, this looks good, govt extending the Seasonal Agricultural Workers' visa scheme from 10,000 to 30,000 to address lack of labour for farming industry after the end of Free Movement.
Here's grinchy Zoe to explain why it's bad. Sorry...
Until now, most seasonal agricultural work was taken on by migrants benefitting from the right to Freedom of Movement in the EU. This meant they could come, pick on this farm, move to that farm with the changing harvest, switch into other work, basically just live.
With the end of Free Mov the Home Office insists less & less convincingly that all lower-paid work our industries need can be covered by the domestic work force.
The "pick for Britain" drive to get British workers into these jobs was a car wreck, filling just 15% of vacancies.
So, yes. There is an urgent need for an alternative source of probably migrant labour to pick, sort and package food on British farms from January.
Two years ago they introduced a pilot visa scheme for this, originally to bring over 2,500 workers for 6 months at a time.
One year ago they extended and expanded the "pilot" scheme to 10,000 workers. There was of course no evaluation of the pilot's success before this expansion, no consultation with expert groups, no evaluation of the risks of the scheme (which I'll explain, are many).