In July 2024, the Migration Advisory Committee released an independent report, “Review of the Seasonal Worker Visa”. The review includes quantitative and qualitative research, including engagement with employers, seasonal workers, scheme operators, and other stakeholders.

The review argues for the continued existence of the seasonal worker visa considering the need for domestic food production to enhance food security amid the climate crises and geopolitical instability. However, it highlights concerns on worker exploitation and makes several key recommendations in this regard:

• Provide certainty around the future of the scheme: visa numbers should be confirmed on an annual basis and employers should be given five years notice if the scheme is to close.
• Create a more flexible visa: this enables workers to maximise their earnings and will enable employers to plan more efficiently. This can be achieved, for example, by allowing workers to work in any 6 month period each year.
• Create fairer work and pay for workers: workers should be guaranteed at least two months’ pay to cover costs of coming to the country and reduce risks for low-income workers.
• Tighten, communicate and enforce employee rights: the report notes seasonal workers are particularly susceptible to abuse amid isolated workplaces, language barriers, and difficulties raising complaints. The report also emphasises the power imbalance between employers and workers, and instances of workers taking on large debts due to recruitment charges. The report recommends a more coordinated approach to enforcement of worker rights, including a clearer delineation of responsibility for worker welfare.
• Give consideration to the Employer Pays Principle: the report calls for further work on investigating how the costs of recruitment can be more equitably shared along the supply chain.

On fairer work and pay for workers, the authors highlight concerns that workers on the seasonal worker visa scheme may be paid less in comparison to other workers doing the same job. The authors therefore support increasing wages for seasonal migrant workers to reduce exploitation and prevent undercutting domestic workers, among other benefits. The report also calls for further consultation on the implementation of the current requirement employers pay workers for 32 hours a week; further, the report calls for workers to be guaranteed two months’ pay as additional protection.

On tightening, communicating and enforcing employee rights, the report calls for the GLAA to have statutory powers to visit farms as part of their compliance work, rather tan only when issues of modern slavery arise. The report calls for more proactive enforcement and highlights the need for workers’ immigration status security to be independent of welfare complaints they raise. The report also calls for more consistent and accurate data collection to improve worker welfare.

On the Employer Pays Principle, the report calls for further work investigating how recruitment charges can be shared along the supply chain. It calls for a timeframe on EPP proposals from the Seasonal Worker Scheme Taskforce’s EPP Feasibility Study and calls for accelerated action here.