Bureaucracy on the Land
The Report on Agricultural Services by the Select Committee on Estimates, is both concise and constructive. No working farmer will have been surprised to learn that he and his fellow- taxpayers had to carry a loss of more than £3 a head on each of the 37,000 men in the labour gangs recruited and administered by the Ministry of Agriculture, and mostly consisting of foreign workers. For this labour force—most of it inexperienced and very little of it hard-working—full employment never looked like being possible except at harvest-time ; and only farmers whose land is adjacent to the camps can normally afford to hire—at a rate above the minimum agricultural wage of 94s. a week—labour which seldom arrives at the right place or the right time, whose need for supervision is often difficult to fulfil in the absence of a lingua franca, and over whom the farmer himself has no authority or powers of discipline. The Report discloses that this force was unemployed for roughly a third of the year. No mention is made of the adverse effect of this state of affairs on the workers themselves, who undoubtedly suffer a degree of demoralisation. The Committee make several detailed and practical proposals making for a progressive reduction in the scope and costs of agricultural services. They have produced a most valuable report.
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