Central Asian workers now account for 85.9% of respondents to the UK government's seasonal workers survey, up from 30.4% in 2021 — a structural shift in how British agriculture sources its harvest labour in the five years since Freedom of Movement ended.

The four countries driving that figure are Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. Among them, Kyrgyzstan held the largest share in 2023 at 33.4% of all survey respondents. Home Office immigration statistics cited by IOM put the Central Asian share of the total scheme at 78%, consistent with the survey trend. The qualitative arm of the government's review also recorded farms recruiting from Turkmenistan, extending the Central Asian footprint to all five post-Soviet republics in the region.

How the Scheme Got Here

The current route has a short but eventful history. A Seasonal Workers Pilot under the Temporary Visas T5 route launched in 2019 with a narrow remit. It was expanded to 10,000 places in 2020, and from January 2021, when Freedom of Movement with the EU formally lapsed, the quota scaled further each year to offset the collapse in the supply of Central and Eastern European workers who had previously filled picking and packing roles under EU treaty rights.

That supply chain had been substantial. In France, for context, farm unions estimated two-thirds of seasonal agricultural workers were EU nationals from Central and Eastern Europe as recently as 2020. The UK had relied on the same pool. Brexit severed access to it almost overnight.

The pivot to Central Asia was the operational answer. Scheme operators — the licensed third-party recruiters who sit between the Home Office and individual farms — built pipelines in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, where a combination of rural unemployment, dollar-denominated wages, and established migration networks made recruitment viable at scale. The survey data tracks how quickly that infrastructure matured: from less than a third of the respondent pool in 2021 to nearly nine-tenths by 2023.

Scale and Policy Weight

The Seasonal Worker visa is not a niche route. The Migration Advisory Committee's 2024 annual report found it accounts for over 75% of work visas issued and carries the largest impact on net migration figures of any work route. That makes the Central Asian shift consequential beyond the agricultural sector — it is now a significant driver of the headline migration numbers that sit at the centre of UK domestic politics.

The visa itself allows stays of up to six months, with workers eligible for roles in fruit, vegetable, and flower production, as well as broader farm work. The six-month ceiling means the workforce turns over twice a year, placing continuous pressure on recruitment pipelines to deliver at volume and on schedule.

The broader operational picture raises questions that the government's own review leaves open. Centralisation of recruitment in a single region creates geographic concentration risk: diplomatic friction, regional instability, or a competing destination offering better terms could disrupt supply chains that British farms now depend on structurally rather than marginally. Kyrgyzstan alone — a country of roughly 7 million people — is being asked to supply more than a third of a scheme that the MAC describes as the dominant work visa route by volume.

There is also a worker-welfare dimension. The Work Rights Centre has published preparatory resources specifically for Central Asian workers navigating UK farm employment — an acknowledgement that workers arriving from Bishkek or Dushanbe face different informational and legal gaps than those who previously came from Romania or Bulgaria, where EU norms provided a degree of baseline alignment.

The shift from a European to a Central Asian labour base for UK agriculture happened fast, driven by policy necessity rather than deliberate design. Whether the infrastructure — recruitment, compliance, worker support — has kept pace with that speed is the question the next phase of the scheme's review will need to answer directly.