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The government doesn’t understand labour shortages in food and farming, and is putting the future of the sector in danger, according to MPs on the Environment Food and Rural Affairs committee who wrote a report on the issues earlier this year. The government has just published its response – rejecting their calls for the Seasonal Workers Scheme to be made permanent, and for the English language requirement for skilled workers in the sector to be lowered. Ministers say they’ve worked closely with industry to respond to labour shortages, pointing to the extra 10,000 visas added to the seasonal worker scheme this year and the plan for an independent review of labour in food and farming.
Conservationists in Scotland are warning that the current bird flu outbreak could drive a seabird species into extinction in the country. The government has already launched a consortium of experts to tackle this, the largest and longest-running bird flu outbreak.  But it could come too late for Great Skua’s on St Kilda, a series of remote islands off the Scottish mainland. A hundred have been found dead this season, with numbers thought to be down around two thirds over the past three years.
Dairy Crest has been fined one and a half million pounds after admitting a host of pollution and odour charges. The company, which produces cathedral city cheese and country life butter, admitted 21 pollution incidents at its Davidstow creamery in Cornwall between 2016 and 2021, two of which killed fish in a local river.