The NFU’s horticulture chair has admitted that farmers are finding it harder to access labour from overseas in the wake of the Brexit vote.

After home office figures released last week showed a 41% increase in hate crimes since the Brexit vote was delivered in June, the NFU’s horticulture chair Ali Capper noted that “We have seen a substantial decrease in the number of workers wishing to come here as a result of Brexit.”

Capper put the dearth in workers down to the plummeting value of sterling, which has made other areas of Western Europe comparatively more attractive.

The NFU spokesperson was responding to the findings of a report by right-wing think tank Migration Watch UK. The report suggests that Britain’s exit from the EU represents an opportunity to improve wages and standards in the farm sector. Labour’s shadow environment secretary Rachael Maskell said a Labour government would push for better conditions and pay with the reintroduction of an agricultural wages board during the party conference last month.

However, Ali Capper contested that farm workers aren’t low paid, saying even harvest work can pay well (£11 to £15 per hour), and added, “Seasonal work is less attractive to the local communities living permanently in most first world economies. Whether it is the USA, Canada, Germany, France or Australia, local people do not aspire to move from farm to farm to follow the season’s harvest.”

The migration think tank was critical of the agricultural lobby’s calls for the government to replace the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme (SAWS) which offered temporary residency to several thousand overseas workers but came to an end in 2014. Its briefing paper points to a 2013 survey of 1,300 agricultural workers by Farmers Weekly, which found that the average hourly wage in the agriculture sector was around a third less than the overall UK average wage.

As Migration Watch UK released its report on Tuesday, the group’s vice chair Alp Mehmet said, “The plentiful supply of cheap foreign labour on British farms all but destroys any incentive producers have of becoming more competitive. Brexit offers them a golden opportunity to do something about the sector's relatively poor levels of productivity. They could start by offering decent wages and improved working conditions."

The NFU horticulture board chair responded, “The NFU is urging government to introduce a substantial trial of a permit scheme to allow workers to pick the UK’s fruit and veg in 2017, a scheme to allow workers to come in and go home again. We have seen a substantial decrease in the number of workers wishing to come here as a result of Brexit - the lower value of the pound makes the UK a less attractive place to work now than for other parts of western Europe. Without seasonal workers fruit and veg will be left to go rotten in the fields.”

Capper continued, “We are surprised Migration Watch is concerned with seasonal workers in agriculture as for decades seasonal workers have come in to pick fruit and veg and gone home again. Seasonal workers in our sector are not an immigration issue,” and claimed, “This country has a labour shortage. With eight million people not born in the UK living and working here of which 3.3 million are from the EEA (source AHDB) and an unemployment rate of just 1.64 million, we do not have enough workers for all the jobs in the UK.”