UK turns to EU for helping hand after Brexit butchers meat sector

Because of labour shortages caused by Brexit, British meat producers have resorted to exporting animal carcasses to the EU for butchering before re-importing the meat, but the UK government has insisted this will be resolved via its domestic workforce.

Beef carcasses have been ferried this week to cutting and packing plants in the Republic of Ireland for butchering before being brought back to the UK, chief executive of the British Meat Processors Association (BMPA) Nick Allen told Reuters on Wednesday (4 November).

“Due to the shortage of meat workers in the UK and the limitations to recruit caused by the immigration policy, processors are taking advantage of the fact that other countries are sourcing extra labour from around the world and exporting meat to be processed and returned to this country,” Allen said.

“Whilst it is an added cost, it is a better option than empty shelves and animals building up on the farms,” he said.

While foreign butchers have been eligible since January 2021 to come to the UK via the skilled worker route, as part of the point-based immigration system, the sector has been struggling from a chronic lack of workers, a problem which has also been compounded by the COVID pandemic.

In efforts to boost the number of meat workers based in the UK, last month the British government agreed to issue 800 temporary visas for butchers to work in the UK for six months. The government has not yet said how many applications have been made.

The news comes on the back of a mass cull of thousands of healthy pigs across the UK after a lack of butchers to carve the carcasses led to a backlog on farms.

Current counts peg the figure at around 10,000 healthy pigs and piglets that have been slaughtered and could not be processed for human consumption.

The industry warns that the slaughter backlog shows no signs of slowing any time soon, pointing out that there is a 15% staff shortage across many meat plants in the UK, climbing as high as 20% in some cases, Allen said.

The UK beef sector alone needs to fill 15,000 vacancies, a majority of them skilled or semi-skilled, he added.

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A spokesperson for the UK department of environment, food and rural affairs (DEFRA) told EURACTIV the government has been “working closely with the meat industry in order to understand how best to support them in response to the challenges caused by the pandemic”.

He pointed out that the export of carcasses is a “commercial decision taken by individual businesses” and also said that extending the temporary visa scheme was not a long-term solution.

Instead, the government is banking on the meat industry being able to draw on the “large domestic labour pool in the UK as we move to a high-wage, high-skilled economy,” he said.

Asked about the possibility of an on-farm backlog, as in the case of the UK pig sector, leading to a cull, the spokesperson said farmers should have contingency plans in place to ensure the welfare of their animals.

These may involve movement of animals to another holding, or on-farm culling of animals that are suffering, or at imminent risk of suffering, adverse welfare impacts, the spokesperson suggested.

[Edited by Zoran Radosavljevic]

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