Ministers are looking at bringing in annual health checks for workers and allowing more hospitality staff to come from abroad in an effort to deal with labour shortages.

The plans could involve giving companies subsidies for occupational health services to prevent workers going off long-term sick, as part of the government’s review of the workforce to be unveiled alongside the budget this month.

Ministers have also asked the Migration Advisory Committee for advice on whether the hospitality, construction and retail industries should be on the list of sectors where there is a shortage of workers, helping them to recruit from overseas.

It is thought hospitality workers are the most likely to be put on the list, which makes it easier for staff to get jobs from abroad.

Jeremy Hunt ordered the workforce review amid concerns the economy is being held back by shortages of workers that have emerged since the pandemic and Brexit.

The health check plans, first reported by the Sunday Times, would form part of the workforce review conducted by the Department for Work and Pensions with input from the Department of Health and Social Care.

It was launched in an attempt to understand why there are about 600,000 more “economically inactive” people of working age than before the pandemic.

The government’s food tsar has blamed Britain’s “weird supermarket culture” for shortages of certain vegetables.

Henry Dimbleby said “fixed-price contracts” between supermarkets and suppliers meant that when food is scarce, some producers sell less to the UK and more elsewhere in Europe.

But the body that represents supermarkets denied that business was hampered by such contracts.

Several supermarkets have limited sales of fresh produce in recent weeks.

Tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers are among those vegetables in scarce supply, largely because of extreme weather affecting harvests in Spain and North Africa.

Shortages are said to have been compounded by high energy prices impacting UK growers, as well as issues with supply chains.

They also come as households are being hit by rising prices, with food inflation at a 45-year high.

As an example of “market failure”, Mr Dimbleby, who advises the government on food strategy in England, said UK lettuce prices in supermarkets were kept stable, regardless of whether there was a shortage or over supply.

Paul Drew, of Drews of Worcester, says his energy costs have risen from 15p per kilowatt to 62p per kilowatt.

To speed up growth he has the option to artificially heat and light his crops, but fears the rising cost will make it unprofitable.

The tomato grower said: “You’d like to think you can plan for it, but I really don’t know how we will survive this year.”

Across the county, some farmers have told the BBC that they have switched off heating and lights earlier this winter – either delaying or cancelling planting.

At its conference in Birmingham last month, the National Farmers Union (NFU) revealed domestic production of salad crops will reach its lowest levels since records began this year.

Speaking on Politics Midlands, Ms Gideon said: “I know the NFU have asked for horticulture to be included in the energy intensive industries.

“We need to be producing more in this country in order to guarantee our own food supply, we need to be helping farmers to do that.”

While supermarket shelves in Worcestershire appear to be sparse, independent grocers remain plentiful with stocks of imported fruit and vegetables sold a higher price.

Jim Thompson, of Three Counties Produce, explained: “A box of tomatoes that we would normally pay £6 for, we are now paying £16.

“We’re paying a premium price but if the supermarkets decided to sell the product at the price it should be, then they would have them on the shelves.”

Brexit has worsened the UK’s acute shortage of doctors in key areas of care and led to more than 4,000 European doctors choosing not to work in the NHS, research reveals.

The disclosure comes as growing numbers of medics quit in disillusionment at their relentlessly busy working lives in the increasingly overstretched health service. Official figures show the NHS in England alone has vacancies for 10,582 physicians.

Britain has 4,285 fewer European doctors than if the rising numbers who were coming before the Brexit vote in 2016 had been maintained since then, according to analysis by the Nuffield Trust health thinktank which it has shared with the Guardian.

In 2021, a total of 37,035 medics from the EU and European free trade area (EFTA) were working in the UK. However, there would have been 41,320 – or 4,285 more – if the decision to leave the EU had not triggered a “slowdown” in medical recruitment from the EU and the EFTA quartet of Norway, Iceland, Switzerland and Lichtenstein.

As farms began to panic about a likely shortage of labour caused by Brexit, the seasonal worker visa was presented as a panacea.

Just 2,500 people came to Britain in a pilot of the scheme in 2019. But when the predicted shortage came to pass the following year, it was expanded rapidly, before an assessment of the pilot could be concluded.

About 40,000 people will come to the UK under the seasonal worker scheme this year, and there are increasing concerns that the hastily constructed programme puts workers at risk of labour exploitation.

When the government review of the pilot was finally slipped out on Christmas Eve last year, it had some concerning polling from workers. It showed 29% of labourers said operators did not adhere to contractual agreements, almost half did not receive a contract in their native language, and 15% said their accommodation was not safe, comfortable, hygienic or warm.

During the Conservative leadership race, Liz Truss signalled her intention to expand the scheme, pledging: “We will make it easier for farmers and growers to access the workers they need, with a short-term expansion to the seasonal workers scheme, while working with industry to address longer-term skills shortages.”

A recent report from the Association of Labour Providers said the Home Office and Defra had not engaged with industry experts in establishing the rules, leaving workers vulnerable to exploitation.

Demand for labour (that’s all employment plus vacancies) has recovered to almost exactly its pre-pandemic level. But the data indicates that the increase in vacancies is not due to a surge in demand for labour, but because the labour force is shrinking: it dropped by 1.6% or 561,000 between the first quarters (Jan-March) of 2020 and 2022, which is greater than the increase in job vacancies over the same period (492,000).

Notably, people’s reasons for being economically inactive have changed over the past couple of years. Following the first COVID lockdown, the large drop in labour supply among 16-64s (those of working age) was mainly driven by rises in long-term sickness (139,000) and early retirement (70,000).

The drop in the workforce also masks a considerable churn within it, which may be adding to employers’ difficulties in recruiting staff. During the first lockdown, the number of EU workers fell by some 300,000. This has partially recovered, as you can see in the chart below, but there are still around 100,000 fewer than at the start of the pandemic.

Yet this has been more than offset by continued long-term growth in the number of non-EU foreign-born workers in the UK, increasing by some 170,000 since the start of the pandemic. Brexit, in other words, in tandem with the pandemic, has been a source of churn in the labour market.

The rise in the rate of job vacancies appears remarkably uneven across local authority districts in Great Britain. The two maps below show the change from before the pandemic in February 2020 (on the left) to July 2021 (on the right), the most recent month for which we have been able to compute data. This is likely to still be indicative of the most recent geographic pattern.

It shows huge increases in vacancies in relatively few districts, while most others show either modest increases or falls. The highest rates are particularly found in remoter rural areas, particularly in the south-west and north-west of England, and in parts of inner London.

Many of these districts are dependent on foreign labour, particularly for agriculture in rural areas, and hospitality and other sectors in London. Again, this may be a sign of the effect of Brexit and the pandemic choking off the growth in the number of EU workers.

The chairman of Britain’s biggest supermarket chain has warned that “the worst is yet to come” on food price inflation, as he predicted it will soon hit 5%.

John Allan, who has chaired Tesco since 2015, told the BBC’s Sunday Morning programme that he was well aware people on very tight budgets were having to choose between food and heating. He said the idea that this was happening was very troubling.

Overall inflation currently stands at 5.4%, a 30-year high, and is predicted to top 6% in the spring, just one element of the cost of living crisis facing UK households. Poverty groups have warned about the impending threat to those on the lowest incomes.

“In some ways the worst is still to come – because although food price inflation in Tesco last quarter was only 1%, we are impacted by rising energy prices. Our suppliers are impacted by rising energy prices. We’re doing all we can to offset it … but that’s the sort of number we’re talking about. Of course, 5%,” he said.

Allan admitted some people would “of course” have less to spend on luxuries, as the price hikes coincide with a rise in national insurance contributions and the £693 increase in the average family’s annual energy bill, to £1,971, both of which come into effect in April.

Last year’s boom in British summer holidays was not enough to save thousands of tourism businesses, despite increased domestic bookings to popular places such as Cornwall and the Yorkshire Dales.

A survey by the Tourism Alliance of 1,927 tour operators, hotels, attractions, language schools and other travel and hospitality businesses serving foreign tourists found that 11% believe they are “very likely to fail” in 2022, and a total of 41% think they are “quite likely to fail”.

The first three months of 2022 are looking bleak, with cancellations soaring in the wake of the Omicron variant. Almost a third of businesses surveyed have lost at least half of bookings made for domestic holidays between January and March this year.

The empty brown fields of England’s winter countryside could be transformed under government plans for farming.

Cold naked acres will in future be clothed in vegetation as farmers are paid for sowing plants that bind the soil together.

The aim is to hold precious topsoil on the land, instead of seeing it washed into rivers during heavy rainfall.

But critics say it is not ambitious enough to reverse the UK’s nature crisis.

The changes are being introduced as part of a broad post-Brexit reform of the subsidies paid to farmers.

Under the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, farmers received taxpayers’ cash proportional to the amount of land they owned – the richer the farmer, the bigger the subsidy.

Farmers are anxiously awaiting further detail from the government on imminent changes to their subsidy payments, with many reluctant to trust the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) to manage the transition, the leader of one of the UK’s biggest farming organisations has said.

“Quite a few have said to me: ‘Well, we’re not at all clear what Defra is doing,’” Mark Tufnell, the recently installed president of the Country Land and Business Association (CLA), told the Guardian. “[They say:] ‘We don’t think that Defra know what they’re doing,’ and ask me: ‘What do you know?’”

The CLA represents about 28,000 farmers and owners of rural businesses in England and Wales, including some of the biggest landowners and a large number of smaller ones, with about 18,000 members farming less than 300 acres. Members are hoping for more details of post-Brexit support for farmers at the organisation’s conference on Thursday, where the environment secretary, George Eustice, will set out what support farmers can expect when their basic farm payments are cut by between 5% and 25% this year before being phased out entirely over the next six years.