Environment secretary Andrea Leadsom has expressed hope that young Britons will take up farm labour and picking jobs currently done by European migrants, as Britain’s exit from the EU looks to be moving closer.

The Defra secretary was speaking at the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham over the weekend, where Prime Minister Theresa May announced that she will invoke Article 50 to begin the UK’s withdrawal from the EU before March next year.

Responding to questions during a fringe event at the Party Conference, Andrea Leadsom said, “We could get British people doing those jobs and that tempts me to stray into the whole issue of why wages aren't higher and so on. My absolute hope is that with more apprenticeships, with more young people being encouraged to engage with countryside matters, that actually the concept of a career in food production is going to be much more appealing going forward."

Farm employers and landowners’ groups have been vocal in their concerns that post-Brexit immigration policy could threaten farm businesses and lead to labour shortages. Discussing the potential for a scheme like the Seasonal Agricultural Labour Scheme (SAWS) which ran until 2014, Leadsom said, “Of course, before we joined the EU we had a very good programme of seasonal workers' licences and it is not beyond the wit of man to have such a thing in future.”

She added, “As has been made very clear, it is not Theresa May's intention to deport anyone unless our European colleagues announce their intention to do likewise. So, she is absolutely intending that those people who come here and do a great job in our food and farming sector continue to do that.”

In March, former Lib Dem MP David Laws, who served as schools minister in the last Coalition government, claimed that Leadsom’s predecessor at Defra and fellow Brexiteer Owen Paterson had suggested employing pensioners to pick fruit in the UK, in order to reduce the sector’s reliance on foreign labour. In a book serialised in the Mail on Sunday, Laws claimed that the former environment secretary had mooted the plan and suggested making pensioners exempt from minimum wage legislation to avoid higher labour costs for farmers during a cabinet meeting.

At the time, Paterson issued a half-denial of Laws’ claims, stating that “We looked at all sorts of options of how we could substitute [the Seasonal Agricultural Workers’ Scheme] once there was open season from the 1 January 2014.”