Plan for £2m Lincolnshire caravan park to house foreign farm workers
A Lincolnshire food producer is planning to spend GBP2m building a caravan park, sports pitch and games area for overseas farm workers. The site near the village of Bennington could house 200 seasonal labourers from Kazakhstan and Pakistan. It is being proposed by T H Clements which supplies vegetables to major UK supermarkets.
The firm’s managing director Chris Gedney said the use of foreign workers was vital for the UK’s food production. He said that UK workers did not apply to work in the fields. “We’ve had crops wasted because of lack of labour,” Mr Gedney said.
“So food security has to be a consideration. “We’ll give them the leisure facilities so that basically they will want to be here and they won’t want to be anywhere else”. The proposed site would have 60 luxury caravans, an indoor games area and a communal sports field.
An application has been submitted to Boston Borough Council. Some neighbours have objected, citing pressure on roads, doctors’ surgeries and drainage. Food producers have said they found it difficult to attract British pickers to rural areas, despite offering increased wages.
In 2021, the Nation Farmers’ Union said only 11% of seasonal workers were UK residents[1]. Justin Emery who runs an agricultural workers recruitment agency said employers were offering all kinds of facilities to attract foreign workers. “We’ve got clients who have an onsite nightclub, an all-weather basketball pitch, indoor football,” he said.
“The farms put a lot of effort making sure those workers have a good experience, because without the seasonal workers in the UK we wouldn’t have food on our shelves.”
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References
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