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Inshore Industry Fishing Crews: Visas

I thought that might prompt a response. I think it is in October or November. Fishing happens all year round, but there is seasonal activity at a time when the industry struggles to find people. Adding that to the seasonal agricultural workers scheme or seasonal food workers scheme could be another option. Such a change would involve only a small number of visas, but it would have a huge impact on the coastal communities.

I will end on the subject of numbers. While we welcome the 55,000 annual visas for seasonal agricultural workers, the numbers that we are talking about today— I am surprised that it has not come up before—are in the hundreds, not the tens of thousands. In addition, we are talking about getting through a transition period, as other hon. Members have said, to a point in the future when, ideally, we would get every single person in the seafood industry working from the local communities in which the industries exist, but certainly we would be talking about very low numbers in the future.

2.33 pm