The Workforce Problem UK Horticulture Keeps Deferring
According to the Environmental Horticulture Group, the UK’s horticultural sector supported 722,000 jobs and contributed £38 billion to the UK economy in 2023. Those are not modest numbers. They are the kind of numbers that ought to attract serious attention to what happens when the workforce behind them starts to thin out.
What happens, in practice, is that 1% of retailers and growers employed apprentices in 2023/24. Three percent for landscapers. Those figures come from the same industry body, the Horticultural Trades Association, reporting in February 2025. The contrast between the scale of what the sector produces and the effort being made to build a pipeline of people who can keep producing it deserves more discussion than it usually gets.
This is not a new problem. The Ornamental Horticulture Roundtable Group commissioned skills research as far back as 2019, surveying more than 1,100 businesses across production horticulture, arboriculture, landscaping, garden retail, and public gardens. Their finding, quoted in the report, was direct: “The sector is facing a critical skills challenge, manifesting in an ageing workforce, difficulties in filling skilled vacancies and challenges in recruiting apprentices and a general shortage of labour.”
That was published seven years ago. The apprenticeship figures suggest not much has moved.
How the Sector Patched the Gap
The reason the problem has not become a crisis is that horticulture found a workaround: seasonal overseas labour. For decades, and with particular scale following EU accession, the edible horticulture sector in particular came to rely on workers from across the EU to plant, tend, and harvest crops that would otherwise go unpicked. The House of Commons Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee reported in December 2020 that EU workers had accounted for as much as 99% of seasonal labour recruited by the edible horticulture sector.
That number tells you something about the structure that had developed. This was not occasional top-up labour. For large parts of the sector, especially soft fruit and vegetable production, the model had become entirely dependent on a workforce that was predominantly non-domestic.
Brexit changed the terms of that arrangement, though it did not end it. The government introduced the Seasonal Worker visa scheme, which had started as a pilot with 2,500 places in 2019. By 2025, the quota stood at 45,000, with 43,000 allocated to horticulture and 2,000 to poultry. For 2026, the allocation is 41,000 for horticulture. The scheme kept labour moving, but it introduced a layer of bureaucracy and cost that had not existed before, and it removed the certainty that came with free movement. Growers who had built business models around knowing they could fill seasonal roles quickly and at scale now had to work through licensed operators, manage visa timelines, and plan further ahead.
The Government’s own Labour in Horticulture Survey, published for Q2 2022, found that around a third of survey respondents said they needed seasonal labour. Of those, the average shortfall was 8% of the total person days required. Across May and June, the peak of the growing season, the average daily shortfall ran to tens of thousands of person-hours. The NFU estimated at the time that as much as £60 million of food could have been wasted in 2022 as a result of labour shortages, though they acknowledged that figure was a projection based on a partial survey.
The seasonal labour problem is real and ongoing. But it is also a symptom. The longer-term structural problem is that the sector has not built enough domestic capacity to do skilled horticultural work, and has done very little to build the routes that would change that.
Why People Do Not See Horticulture as a Career
When you talk to people in the industry about the skills shortage, perception comes up quickly. Horticulture does not register as a career choice for most young people leaving school or college. It sits somewhere in the blur of “outdoor work” that also includes landscaping and grounds maintenance, and tends to be associated with low pay and physical labour rather than technical skill, scientific knowledge, or genuine professional development.
Some of that perception is accurate. Entry-level wages in horticulture remain low relative to other sectors competing for the same pool of school leavers. But a significant part of it is a communication failure. The sector is not good at explaining what skilled horticultural work actually involves. Most people have no idea that a nursery manager needs to understand integrated pest management, plant health legislation, inspection protocols, and basic business finance, sometimes all on the same Tuesday.
I have spent nearly two decades building an audience through Simplify Gardening and talking regularly to people who grow on a commercial scale. A recurring theme among smaller growers is that they did not plan to end up where they are. They grew food for their own household, then for neighbours, then for local markets. The transition from hobbyist to professional happened gradually and without any formal training infrastructure around it. They learned by doing. Most of them still learn that way.
That is not a criticism of those growers. It reflects something true about how horticultural knowledge actually gets transmitted in the UK, often through networks, through observation, through trial and error. But it also means that the formal apprenticeship pipeline, where it does exist, is reaching a narrow slice of people rather than the wider population that is already interested in growing.
The Interest That Went Somewhere Else
In July 2021, the RHS reported something the sector should have paid more attention to. Applications for its work-based training programmes had reached their highest number in decades. Demand was up 58% overall. Applications for its entry-level apprenticeship scheme had increased by 60%. Notably, around 39% of applicants were aged 25-34, and nearly half were women. The RHS described many of them as career changers, people who had spent lockdown growing food or tending gardens and had concluded they wanted to do something different with their working lives.
That is not a fringe group. That is a substantial cohort of people with motivation, some accumulated practical knowledge, and a clear appetite for something more structured. The question is what the sector did with them.
The honest answer is: not enough. The apprenticeship places were not there in sufficient numbers. The pathways into full-time horticultural careers were not well signposted. Some of those people found routes in. Many did not. The percentage of the grower and retailer workforce employed as apprentices in 2023/24, two to three years after that surge in applications, remained at 1%.
That gap, between the people who wanted in and what the sector had ready for them, is where the skills crisis actually lives.
What the Sector Needs to Do Differently
The HTA’s response to the apprenticeship figures in 2025 was to call on the government to reform the apprenticeship levy and create a more flexible Growth and Skills Levy, specifically asking that land-based sectors be included in the policy design. That is a reasonable ask. The current levy system does not work well for a sector dominated by small and micro businesses. A nursery employing six people does not have the infrastructure to build an apprenticeship programme around government funding mechanisms designed with larger employers in mind.
But the levy is not the only obstacle. The OHRG survey found that businesses were also struggling with awareness: a lack of understanding of the apprenticeship model, and limited knowledge of incoming T levels as a route for guiding young people toward the sector. None of this requires a change in law. These are problems of reach and communication, and the sector already has the organisations to fix them.
The RHS, the CIH, the HTA, and the growing networks of land-based colleges have the existing relationships to do this. The challenge is consistent coordination and honest communication with two different audiences: the young people and career changers who might be interested in horticulture, and the businesses that need to be willing to take on apprentices and provide genuinely useful training rather than cheap labour under a different label.
There is also a question about what the sector is willing to pay. Low wages are a genuine barrier to recruitment, especially when people are weighing up a career change against an existing salary. The government has consistently told the horticulture sector to improve pay and conditions as part of reducing dependence on seasonal overseas labour. That message has been easier to receive than to act on in a sector where margins are already tight and where the cost of compliance, certification, and rising input prices is already pressing on smaller businesses.
The Defra Horticulture Business Survey from 2022 found that 44.4% of edible growers and 33.2% of ornamental growers reported annual turnover under £100,000. Those businesses cannot easily absorb wage increases without either raising prices or changing their business model. Which is, in part, why many of them have not tried to recruit apprentices at all.
What This Looks Like from the Ground
HortTrack was built partly to help small growers manage the record-keeping requirements that come with professional operation. Plant passport records, stock movements, and inspection logs. The growers I talk to most often are running operations that one or two people could not comfortably sustain at their current scale, but which cannot yet support a third person on full pay. The apprenticeship question often comes up as something they will think about when they are older.
I spoke to one grower recently, someone running a solid small market garden operation, who said she would take on help tomorrow if she thought she had time to train them properly. That sentence covers the problem fairly completely. The businesses that most need more capacity are usually the ones with the least room to create it.
That logic is understandable. It is also exactly how skills shortages perpetuate themselves. Businesses defer training investment because they cannot absorb the overhead. The pipeline stays thin. When they do reach the point where they need skilled staff, the skilled staff are not there, so they stay smaller than they could be or burn out running operations that outgrew them.
The sector’s workforce problem is not going to be solved by better government communication about T levels, or a revised apprenticeship levy, or another cohort of applications to the RHS’s training programmes. All of those things matter. But the underlying issue is structural: a sector that accounts for £38 billion and 722,000 jobs has built almost nothing in the way of domestic training proportionate to that scale, and has depended for decades on a model of seasonal overseas labour that is now being squeezed from both ends.
The interest is there. The 2021 surge in applications showed that clearly. The question is whether the sector is willing to build something for it to flow into.
Sources: Environmental Horticulture Group / HTA: National Apprenticeship Week: More government support is needed in horticulture (February 2025). House of Commons Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee: The UK’s new immigration policy and the food supply chain (December 2020). House of Lords Library: The UK’s horticultural sector (October 2022). Defra: Labour in Horticulture Survey 2022 Q2. AHDB / Ornamental Horticulture Roundtable Group: Ornamental horticulture skills survey (2019). Defra: Horticulture Business Survey 2022.
