British Farming Minister George Eustice has made controversial comments concerning unemployed U.K. residents, claiming they should be forced to come off benefits in order to gain work picking fruit on farms around the country.

George Eustice

Eustice was speaking on the first day of the National Farmers' Union conference on Tuesday when the topic of the contentious scrapping of the Seasonal Agriculture Workers Scheme (SAWS) was discussed, the Daily Mail reported.

Under the historic SAWS legislation, migrant workers from Poland, Romania and Bulgaria would plug the gaps in the fruit-picking workforce during harvest times on British farms. This has traditionally been a way of working in the U.K. since the 1960s but was scrapped at the end of last year.

Since Romania and Bulgaria became full EU members in 2013, much of the workforce has favored other types of employment in the U.K. now legislation allows them to take up other full time positions in better-paid industry sectors. At the same time, the majority of British unemployed continue to shun low-skilled jobs such as fruit-picking and choose to remain in the benefits systems.

At the same time, the majority of British unemployed continue to shun low-skilled jobs such as fruit-picking and choose to remain in the benefits systems.

In December, www.freshfruitportal.com reported about the concerns of farming officials who were worried for the future of the British horticultural industry, which has heavily relied on migrant labor from Europe for decades.

According to the Daily Mail, Eustice told members of the conference that many unemployed people refused to pick fruit.

"I know that some people would say you won't get them to do this work, they won’t do it. As a government we shouldn’t really tolerate that attitude that says we are going to pay people to stay on benefits because they don’t want to do certain types of farming work," Eustice told the conference, according to the Daily Mail.

"We don’t think it is acceptable that people who could work do not because they think there is something unglamorous about farm work," he was quoted as saying.

The minimum wage in the U.K. is £6.31 (US$10.53) per hour, however many of the fruit-picking jobs pay more but are only temporary, because they last for a specific harvest period and involve long working hours of manual labor.

"Sometimes the barrier is that people feel it is not worth coming off benefits for a month or six weeks because they then have the difficulty of getting back on those benefits. That is something we are trying to address," Eustice was quoted as saying.

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