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Each year, Britain relies on hundreds of Australian and New Zealand sheep shearers who work on UK farms in the summer.

But strict new visa requirements have stopped the flow of workers into Britain from outside the European Union.

The UK is now faced with a critical shortage of shearers and the prospect of serious health and welfare issues that emerge if sheeps’ fleeces are not cut.

Farmer Robert Morris from East Sussex says he hires shearers from Australia and New Zealand for contract shearing.

"We have run into all sorts of problems this year with a new immigration system that has been introduced by our government at the end of last year," he said.

The new immigration laws were supposed to stop terrorists entering the UK.

"These guys are far from being terrorists," said Mr Morris. "They are professional shearers.

"They come here from May 1 until the end of July and come the end of July they want to be gone back to their own countries for shearing over there."

Gladwyn Transom mows lawns in Brisbane during the Australian summer and works on Rob Morris’s farm in East Sussex in the south of England in the European summer.

But this year he has decided it is all too hard.

"Just the hassle and all the things they want for you to get a permit to go in," he said. "It is just too much hassle and I’m just not going to bother."

It used to be a matter of a simple work permit and a nominal fee.

It is now $500 for the shearer, another $350 for the farmer, a mountain of paperwork, a trip to a UK visa processing bureau and a biometric identity card.

British immigration lawyer Phillip Bath says the reality is that Australians should probably forget about that annual sheep shearing trip to Blighty.

"If you are an intending migrant, it has overnight made the UK a much more difficult place to get a visa for," he said.

"If they have got dependent children or they are over 30 years old, they can’t come in and they are unlikely to be able to come here."

It has come as a real blow for British farmers like Mr Morris.

"We need somewhere in the region of 500 shearers from Australia and New Zealand for our season," he said.

"Guys that need the working visas are the real professional shearers who can shear between 300 and 400 sheep a day."

There is a critical shortage of sheep shearers worldwide. It is a job you retire from in your mid-30s, and young men are no longer taking it up.

Mr Morris says there are shearers already living in the UK, but not enough to complete shearing within the season.

"We have got about 25 million sheep in the UK to shear and we estimate that about a quarter of these, about 25 per cent of these, are shorn by Australian and New Zealand shearers," he said.

"The sheep will get shorn, albeit it will be late in the summer and if this is the case, we shall encounter a lot of welfare problems such as blowfly strike and sheep getting on their backs with full fleeces and unable to get back on their feet and they will die within a matter of hours."

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