THE Home Office should reclassify factory and farming jobs  as “skilled work” as they can’t be done by robots and are sectors suffering “acute labour shortages,” former environment minister George Eustice has said.

The Tory MP and former strawberry farmer called for an immigration policy that responded to the needs of the economy rather than the government’s “skills-based” system, but failing that  “at least recognise the correct skills — and those are dextrous, human skills.”

Arguing that Britain needed a long-term seasonal workers scheme,  Mr Eustice said the government was “not defining skills correctly” in its immigration policy.

“It allows in people with cognitive skills — lawyers, accountants. But we have no shortage of those people,” he said.

“In the age of artificial intelligence, many of those jobs can be done by robots in future.”

He said Britain doesn’t allow in people with “dextrous skills” such as food factory workers despite doing work “robots find hardest to do.”