This week, BMPA has written to Defra Minister Daniel Zeichner to raise urgent concerns about the damaging impact of recent changes to the UK immigration visa system on the meat processing and manufacturing sector.

The UK meat industry is a cornerstone of the food supply chain, underpinning both national food security and vital export markets. However, new restrictions on visa eligibility – including raising qualification thresholds, removing most skilled butchery and slaughter roles from the Shortage Occupation List, and sharply increasing salary and language requirements – have left businesses struggling to recruit essential staff.

The consequences are already being felt across the industry: acute labour shortages, reduced plant throughput, growing animal welfare risks, lost export opportunities and rising costs that feed directly into food price inflation. Despite major investments in domestic recruitment and training, the sector simply cannot bridge this gap quickly enough, especially given the years of training required to develop highly skilled butchers.

In our letter, we urged Government to take immediate steps to ease these pressures. Chief among our asks are the reinstatement of critical meat industry roles onto the Temporary Shortage List, a review of salary thresholds to better reflect regional pay realities, the creation of targeted visa routes for strategically important sectors like food security and streamlining of visa processing to reduce lead times.

We also highlighted to the Minister that leading UK retailers, represented by the British Retail Consortium, are already raising concerns about how labour shortages in meat processing plants could disrupt supply, particularly during peak periods such as Christmas.

BMPA stands ready to work constructively with Government to develop pragmatic, balanced solutions that will ensure the resilience of the UK’s food supply chain and safeguard the competitiveness of the meat sector.