Britons have not refused to pick fruit. They have refused to move to Herefordshire for eleven weeks and then leave.

The claim comes round with the harvest, and it comes round loosely. British people will not pick fruit. It is worth being exact about what the evidence shows people doing, because will not do the work and will not do the work on these terms, in this place, for eleven weeks are different behaviours with different causes.

Start with the money, because it is what everyone reaches for, and because it does not carry the weight put on it. In 2023 the median for horticultural trades was £11.30 an hour and for farm workers £11.10. The jobs competing for exactly the same people, asking no more qualifications, paid much the same: warehouse operative £12.10, retail assistant £11.00, kitchen and catering assistant £10.60. The Migration Advisory Committee's conclusion was that pay is unlikely to be the deciding factor, since comparable money is available elsewhere. If this were only about the rate, some of those warehouse workers would already be in a polytunnel.

What differs is everything arranged around the rate. Fruit picking is seasonal by definition, so it is not a job you can hold, only one you can have for a stretch. It happens where the fruit grows, which is rarely where workers already live. It asks you to arrive fit, work outdoors at pace for a few intense weeks, and then stop. For a person with a tenancy, a school run, a partner's shifts or a benefits claim that a short contract disturbs, that is not an unappealing job. It is an unavailable one.

This is the part I think gets misread as character. It is not that the country went soft. It is that the ordinary British adult is anchored, by housing they cannot give up for a season and obligations that do not pause for a harvest. The people who can take work like this are the ones with nothing anchoring them here, which is precisely what a six-month visa selects for. The scheme did not find people who were willing to do unpleasant work. It found people for whom the part we think of as the drawback, leaving at the end, was the entire point.

Elena has the series above: the number of people doing this work barely moved between 2019 and 2023, while the share of them on visas went from a rounding error to nearly two thirds. The work did not change. Who was free to take it did.

And this is only ever a problem for one kind of farm. Per farm in England, horticulture uses 3.90 casual workers. Dairy uses 0.21, cereals 0.21, grazing livestock 0.11. Nearly nineteen times the difference. Farming does not have a labour problem. Picking does.

The last party to this is the shopper, and she is not being a hypocrite, whatever the summer columns imply. She has never been shown any of it. The price of a punnet is settled between a grower and a buying desk long before she reaches it, and nothing on the packaging records whose hands. It is difficult to hold a contradiction you have never been allowed to see.

We usually ask what people will do when they no longer have to work. Here the question arrives upside down. This is a job Britons have not had to do, and their answer has been visible for a decade. Something nearer. Something all year. Something they can come home from at the end of the day.