16
Examination of Witnesses
Margaret Beels, Suzanne McCarthy and David Neal.
Q113 The Chair: We are now moving on to our second session of the day. I will start with the tradition question. Who are you, what are your organisations, and what is the most important thing for the horticultural sector as you see it?
Margaret Beels: I am the director of labour market enforcement, which is a function that was created in the Immigration Act 2016. The main function of the director is to set a strategy that guides the activity of three organisations.
There is the organisation that enforces the national minimum wage, which is in HMRC, but it is a responsibility of the business department. There is the agency that seeks to make sure that employment agencies operate according to the standards. Then there is the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority, whose board Suzanne is on. Without stealing her thunder too much, it has two functions. One is a licensing function for labour providers in the agricultural sector. It also has oversight over forced and compulsory labour as regards modern slavery.
My role is set up by government to try to create greater cohesion and strategic direction for these organisations. I produce a strategy once a year and then I write an annual report to see whether the strategy has worked.
David Neal: I am the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration. My post was established by the Borders Act 2007. I monitor, report and make recommendations on the effectiveness and efficiency of the performance of functions and services provided in the customs, immigration, asylum, nationality and visa areas.
We inspect organisations such as Border Force, Immigration Enforcement, asylum and protection. We inspect and then make recommendations and reports, and the reports go to the Home Secretary. Many of the areas are distinct, such as this one—this is not an area that we have looked at before—and they are not complementary.
For example, inspections that we have ongoing or are reporting at the moment include deprivation of citizenship by the Home Office, asylum case working, the Afghan resettlement process, and insider threat in Border Force, so there is quite a variety of subjects. This is the first time that we have looked at this particular area.
Suzanne McCarthy: As Margaret said, I am a member of the board of the GLAA. I also chair the audit and risk assurance committee for that organisation. You may know that the GLAA has been operating since 2005. That followed the Morecambe Bay tragedy that we all remember.
It is a statutory regulator and its purpose is to stop worker abuse in the UK. We operate under two pieces of legislation—the Gangmasters (Licensing) Act 2004, supplemented by the Modern Slavery Act 2015. Under the 2004 legislation, we are responsible for providing licences to businesses that supply workers to shellfish gathering, agriculture, horticulture, food processing and packaging. We have powers that go throughout the UK, but some are different in different parts of the nations. I should say that, even though we have a nationwide remit, only 121 people are employed by the GLAA, so it is small but perfectly formed.
I should also tell you that we have about 1,100 licence holders. Horticulture is a subset of agriculture, and we record information generally under the term “agriculture”. Of those, 443 licensees have indicated that they wish to operate in horticulture. There is no expectation that they do so, but they can if they so wish, where they are licensed by us.
I should make it clear that we do not run the seasonal worker scheme and do not record data specifically on the scheme, but seasonal worker scheme operators and labour providers in their supply chains must have a GLAA licence.
Q114 Baroness Willis of Summertown: David, could you outline the key findings of your recent inspection of the immigration system as it relates to agriculture, but really focusing on the horticultural sector?
David Neal: The on-site visits that we did related to soft fruit farms in Fife, Worcestershire and Herefordshire, and so, coincidentally, the focus is on horticulture. The inspection took place between May and August of last year. We sent it to the Home Office at the end of September, and it was published in December, as previous speakers have said.
It is the first time we have inspected this area. Part of the rationale was to look at the overarching strategy objective of the Home Office, which is called Outcome Delivery Plan 3 (ODP3). It is quite important for us as an organisation, because that strategic hook is to enable the legitimate movement of people and goods to support economic prosperity. Unlike others who have spoken, we are not necessarily looking at, for this inspection, the exploitation but at economic prosperity.
We did a very similar inspection into education to look at how the Home Office was facilitating education. We are doing one later in the year on fisheries, so it is perhaps different from some of the vulnerability issues. We discussed with Ministers beforehand this change in the way we did business.
The inspection looked at the effectiveness of routes that support the sector, and the seasonal worker and skilled worker routes. We looked at compliance and how the Home Office assures that sponsors are upholding their compliance requirements. Finally, we looked at the extent and quality of communications and engagement between the Home Office and the sector.
What were the key findings? The Home Office is a critical enabler for the agricultural and horticultural sectors. It did a reasonably good job of facilitating the movement, at the time of the inspection, of some 66,000 overseas workers, particularly against the backdrop of Covid and the conflict in Ukraine, but we found significant room for improvement in three particular areas—I am pleased that some of them had been touched already: compliance, communications and engagement, and clarity. We made three recommendations, all of which were accepted by the Home Office.
On compliance, we found that the Home Office really needs to raise its game and to assure itself that scheme operators are not perpetuating poor working conditions. It was unable, for example, to measure effectively whether standards were being upheld. We had evidence that, of the 25 compliance visits conducted by the Home Office, it found significant welfare issues in nine. It is not clear what action was taken as a result of that information. At best, it was fed back to operators several months later and, at worst, nothing was done with it. Nevertheless, the requirements for scheme operators have improved and been refined as the scheme has progressed, but guidance still needs to be underpinned by a resolve to really hold people to account, and we did not see much evidence of this during the inspection.
On communications and engagement, numerous stakeholders in the sector wanted to work with the Home Office. It was clear from the inspection that there was a real appetite for improved communications. The Home Office thought that it was doing quite well in this area, but, in stark contrast, the sector definitely thought otherwise. The Home Office’s view was that Defra was the organisation to conduct stakeholder management. We are not clear why, because, in other areas such as education, the Home Office manages its stakeholder engagement. Since this is a particular route, it came as a bit of a surprise to us.
Finally, we found a lack of clarity about responsibility among most parties that contributed to the inspection, including Home Office staff. This is cross-departmental, complex government business. If it is to achieve its ODP3 aim, which is to enable legitimate movement to support prosperity, this needs a cross-government response. We found from the inspection that there needs to be real clarity about who is responsible to whom, for what. A better co-ordinated approach should increase the effectiveness.
Baroness Willis of Summertown: I was rather struck by Suzanne’s comment that she does not collect the data. Do you have enough data, was there enough data, or are there significant gaps in the evidence base to be able to make recommendations?
David Neal: In preparation for this, I looked for the evidence and for the data in our report, and it is not great. The data across the Home Office is generally poor; that is a theme of many other reports. For example, in the 25 inspections that we looked at, we could find evidence—in other words, reports—of only 19. That is an example of where the data and the evidence are poor.
Suzanne McCarthy: We did, in fact, go through the agricultural information. I would not call them complaints. They are elements of information that come to us. We manually went through those, and I can give you data as a result of that. As I said, horticulture is considered to be part of agriculture, so we do not normally say, “That’s seasonal workers”, and have them in a special category, but I have data for you if you want it.
Baroness Willis of Summertown: It came through from the other session as well and I was just curious to know whether we have the right data in order to make very detailed recommendations.
David Neal: I suspect that we do not.
Q115 Baroness Walmsley: David, you said that you were not sure what was happening as a result of some of the concerns that your report raised. In some cases, maybe nothing happened. What is your link with the GLAA? Is this thing joined up? Surely, if there were real concerns, they should have been passed on to the GLAA, which inspects in relation to licences.
David Neal: As an inspectorate, we are inspecting this particular area and then we move on. If we discover any particular concerns during our on-sites, we would send them on as a matter of intelligence.
Baroness Walmsley: Is that a formal route?
David Neal: We get intelligence on a regular basis suggesting that there are vulnerabilities right across the immigration system, and we would feed those into the appropriate body in the same way, as an intelligence thing. We are an inspectorate, not the Home Office, but we would always, in terms of propriety, make sure that we signposted anything that we come across.
Margaret Beels: I just wanted to add a few thoughts in relation to David’s report, which I read with great interest, and I recognised a lot of what he said. The third recommendation related to creating a road map of who does what. The Home Office accepted the recommendation, but indicated that it could discharge it only in respect of Home Office functions. To my mind, the whole point is that it is not just the Home Office and needs to be other people.
I am exploring with the Home Office, Defra and other parties whether my office, which has this hovering role above things, could help in creating a road map of who does what. There is a famous diagram, which appears in reports that come from our office, about who does what. How on earth is a worker from overseas expected to navigate that? I am hoping that we might be able to do a piece of work to create that road map.
David also recommended creating a memorandum of understanding between the bodies. I will take step one and then see where that gets to, because, typically, these memoranda of understanding, especially if they are multiparty, take a lot of doing. I would like to at least create the road map.
David Neal: We see that again and again across government, because our statutory obligations are to report on Home Office matters. Take Afghan resettlement, for example; you have the Ministry of Defence, the FCDO and the Home Office, and it is very difficult to come up with a full answer when you are inspecting only one part of it. Equally, we cannot push everything up to the Cabinet Office either. Not every area has a statutory body that is inspecting it, so it is a challenge.
Suzanne McCarthy: At the GLAA, we receive information from a variety of government and non-government bodies that we use as intelligence. Can I just mention some of the problems in this area in collecting data? It is not visible. If you are in a car wash or getting your nails done, it is much more visible that there may be something wrong. Here, they are on farms. They are not out there in the public.
Reflecting much of what was said in the previous panel, they are of different nationalities, they have not worked in the UK before, they do not know their rights. We are trying to help them by going into their countries and telling them their rights before they come here, although we have no powers to enforce. They may be here for only a few months. All those factors combined make it more difficult to collect robust and evidence-led data, but I agree with Margaret that joined-up working and the collection of data are the answer to many of the issues.
Margaret Beels: A document that was published by the Home Office sets out the responsibility of the scheme operators. It is a long and very good list. It covers the whole range of things, from the accommodation and payment of workers to how they should complain and all that stuff, but who is making sure that it happens and what are the sanctions if they do not happen? There are sanctions in the form of taking away the licence, but that is a bit of a nuclear option. We would like to have things improved quickly, without necessarily taking enforcement action.
The Home Office[1] does a survey of workers’ experience, but it does it at the end of the year. Typically, the workers who respond to it have already gone back to the country of origin, which is too little, too late, to make a difference on the ground. I have suggested, if there is scope, doing shorter pulse surveys that try to collect perhaps more specific data. That would help.
Q116 The Earl of Arran: Suzanne, you will be very capable of answering this question. How many instances of exploitation or abuse have been identified in the United Kingdom relating to seasonal workers?
Suzanne McCarthy: I remember that you talked about complaints. I would rather use another term, which is evidence of allegations. In the year from December 2021 to December 2022, which is when we looked manually to see whether we could identify the horticultural intelligence that we received, we had 74 allegations relating particularly to the seasonal worker scheme. Not all those allegations are for us. They may, in fact, highlight issues that other organisations need to deal with or may lead to multiple investigations. There may be insufficient information, so we just collect it and keep it. Nine of those 74 progressed to an investigation.
In horticulture and agriculture, between 2020 and 2022, 547 elements of intelligence came to us. As I said, they do not all lead to an investigation, but they are pieces of information that help us to understand what is happening in the sector. As Margaret said, they lead to the ultimate sanction, which is removal of a licence. I would like to emphasise, and it was emphasised in the previous panel, the importance of prevention rather than the endgame—taking away the licence. That leads to a loss of work for the seasonal workers, and they have to find or be found other work, or go home.
The Earl of Arran: So things could be much worse.
Suzanne McCarthy: I would hope that they would be much better, to be honest, but let us hope that the GLAA and my colleagues here are helping to make things better, as your previous panel did.
Q117 Baroness Walmsley: What powers do UK organisations have when abuse or exploitation are identified with seasonal workers, such as debt bondage? I know that the GLAA is the regulatory body for investigating unlawful fees, but what can you do about it? Do you have any powers or leverage? What can you do when you have identified it?
Suzanne McCarthy: The first thing we do is try to work with the body, because there could be various reasons why things were in breach. It could just be negligence, carelessness or a lack of knowledge. Therefore, you want to see whether you can repair and ensure that the labour provider or labour user is acting properly.
The ultimate sanction, if you have a continuum, is that you take the licence away. Those are the teeth that we have at the end of the day, but I would emphasise prevention—working with those in the field and those who are licensed, ensuring, through good inspections and due diligence, that they are behaving in the way they should, and seeking to correct anything that is wrong such that it does not reach the point of being a fundamental breach.
Margaret Beels: The due diligence of the scheme operators is fundamental here, because it is they who are working with the agencies in the source countries. It is they who should be out there making sure that workers have not been paying fees that they should not have to pay. It is their due diligence that is important.
I looked at the website of one of the scheme operators yesterday. It clearly lists the countries from which it is or is not prepared to recruit workers. It also has a very clear statement about upfront payment of fees, and that anybody who claims to represent it as an agency and who is charging a fee is not representing it.
That is great. That is in English, on a website in this country. The question is how to make sure that it is out there in the source countries in a language that the workers understand. It is an indication of the sort of due diligence that the scheme operators recognise they need to undertake.
Baroness Walmsley: So they take their business away from countries that do that.
Margaret Beels: That is right.
Suzanne McCarthy: We have to understand that we have territorial limits to the GLAA’s work. We can work in this country. We have had a scheme running in Romania, in Romanian, which tells Romanian workers who may be thinking of coming here what they need to know about the UK structure, about UK laws and about what they should expect. We are trying to reach, with the help of other countries, those in the labour force who may be thinking of coming here for a seasonal worker scheme or otherwise, and explain why they should avoid certain scams and what they should know.
When they get here, we are working with them. We meet and greet them. We have an app. We have videos coming out in different languages, so that we can reach, as was said, parts that you cannot reach if you are simply doing it in English and thinking about it as a UK-only structure.
Q118 Baroness Jones of Whitchurch: Suzanne, I want to follow up on why there were so few complaints in the horticulture sector to the gangmasters scheme. There were only 15 complaints last year, even though we are already hearing that, underneath all that, there are many more issues that you are coming to terms with. We know that Margaret’s organisation is identifying some of those.
What is the problem about people coming forward with complaints? You said that you capture intelligence as well, which is all good, so there are other ways of doing it. At the coalface, you should be recording and pursuing complaints, so I am just wondering why there were so few.
Suzanne McCarthy: As I said earlier, the word “complaint” is wrong. It is a misunderstanding. We are talking about intelligence that is coming in. From that, we are able to determine who did what and whether we need to do something with inspections. We have only 121 staff, so it is not as though we have thousands of staff who can go out. We investigated in nine areas where we felt there was a need for investigation.
It is important to recognise the need to get people to talk. In the last session, the comment was made that sometimes workers, who have spent a lot of money coming here, are frightened of coming forward, because they think that that will affect their ability to stay here and they do not want to rock the boat, or they feel that the person they have been employed by might take action against them that is not in their favour.
It is not the sort of activity where it is easy, either for the public or possibly even for those who are being supplied—Margaret mentioned due diligence, and she is absolutely right on that—to recognise that there is a problem. If they do not feel empowered to speak, or if there is no one around who will be for them and support them, it is more difficult for them to speak up. They might say, “Well, I don’t know how it works here. It might be like this”, or they might say, “I’m here for only a short time. I don’t want to rock the boat. I need the money. I’m going home”.
There are quite a number of barriers to us getting the intelligence, but we use various pathways to help them get this information. We get emails. Of course, everyone has a mobile phone now and can do that. We have phonelines. We get referrals from the police; we get referrals about modern slavery. I am on the Fundraising Regulator and we had an instance just recently where a person who felt they were a slave was working on clothing bags. That was given not just to the GLAA but to the Red Cross as first responders.
I have said and will say again that prevention is better than anything. We have a video coming out specifically aimed at workers to address their expectations—“What do you think you might find when you come here?”—and their rights. We are developing a meet and greet scheme for seasonal workers as soon as they enter the UK to provide information on their rights. GLAA compliance officers will be accompanying UK visa and immigration officers on worker welfare visits over the next few weeks. We will then assess what we have learned and what we can take away from that.
Due diligence of suppliers was mentioned. We are working with the largest supermarkets, the seasonal worker scheme operators, the Association of Labour Providers and others all across the horticulture sector to launch an app to help workers who are here for seasonal work. It provides clear advice and guidance for workers in their own language. That is very important for recruitment and employment.
Baroness Jones of Whitchurch: Do you allow anonymous complaints? Do you guarantee confidentiality? How does all that work? That is the route to getting more intelligence, is it not?
Suzanne McCarthy: We do have anonymous complaints. If we have legal requirements regarding a breach and have to go beyond confidentiality, we have to behave like that, but we do get them. We welcome any piece of intelligence. If they are so anonymous that we cannot follow it up, or they have not given us enough and have simply said, “I’m being exploited” but not where or how, it is more difficult. We do not require names to be given, but it is helpful if they do.
Q119 Baroness Fookes: If we assume that a seasonal worker who feels that they are being mistreated in any way overcomes all the obstacles described so vividly to us, what is it that they can do for themselves as a pathway to try to get redress? How clear is that pathway?
David Neal: I am not sure I can answer that, but I would go back to an earlier question about resourcing. There is a question of resourcing here. We have only 30 staff, not 120‑odd, I would hasten to add. We were in Scotland earlier in the year, not as part of but complementary to this inspection. There is one GLAA person in Scotland, so you will inevitably get fewer complaints or fewer pieces of intelligence if there are fewer individuals on the ground, so to speak.
Baroness Fookes: So you are saying that, if somebody has the guts to get up and do something about it, they are not going to get anywhere.
David Neal: It is absolutely not for us to comment on it. However, we have lots of experience in other areas, and what is really important here are measurements of effect, rather than necessarily just measurements of activity. What is the effect? Are people coming forward, and can they come forward?
We have found in similar inspections that there needs to be a real push forward from the organisation to make sure that you are into communities and can break down the barriers in order to facilitate a proper flow of information and intelligence. Given the number of obstacles—language obstacles, for example, or reluctance because people are in bondage—you really have to work hard, and there is a question about the volume of staff to be able to facilitate that.
Baroness Fookes: Yes, but my question was about what the individual does in these circumstances. What rights of redress do they have that they can carry out?
Margaret Beels: It is a complicated scheme, so who is responsibility for what is part of it. The scheme operators bring the workers into this country. The workers are then employed by the farms. If the worker has a complaint about the farm, the scheme requires each operator to have a mechanism in place for the worker to complain to them. That ought to be the first route that they try. If they have an issue with their accommodation not working properly, with the facilities or with not being paid properly, the scheme says that they should take that issue to the operator.
The questions then are these: “Is that working and is that sufficiently independent? Who’s checking up on the operators?” The Home Office has set up a team of people to review what the operators are doing and to check them. It is planning to have half a dozen, which goes back to the resource question. The scheme provides that a worker should go to the operator and say, “I’m being mistreated”. It could be verbal abuse, pay issues or all these other things. That is what the scheme says is their first recourse.
Baroness Fookes: I was assuming that, but that they did not get any satisfaction, so what next?
Margaret Beels: They can use the ACAS helpline. There are various helplines that workers can use. The question is whether they are well enough understood and easy enough for workers to access.
Q120 The Chair: I went through the guidelines, but there seems to be only one nuclear option, which is that you lose your licence. That does not seem proportionate, but that is the only sanction.
Margaret Beels: That is a weakness, because, very often, these things have an economic background to them. There might be penalties that encourage them to invest the money to avoid the penalty. I am not saying that that is a firm recommendation, but you have to think in those terms rather than just remove their licence.
The Chair: It says that, even if it is one worker, you can lose your licence, which seems like a nuclear option.
Margaret Beels: As was mentioned in the last session, there is then a concern for the workforce. When the scheme operator lost its licence, they were getting assurances that it would be all right. In a world in which they are cherishing their visa, and their visa has come through the sponsorship of that organisation, they are seriously worried.
Suzanne McCarthy: It might be helpful to look from the GLAA’s perspective at what would happen if the licence was taken away. If a seasonal worker operator was suspended, it would be a red flag to the GLAA and we would inspect as such. It could also happen that we revoke the GLAA licence. If that happened, we would conduct what is called a community impact assessment to determine how the workers will be affected by that revocation.
Usually, the labour user would take them on, but, if they were not able to do so, another labour provider might step in, if it was supplying in the same location. When a licence is revoked, it does not happen immediately. There is a short period of days given, so that the business can put itself in order and find someone to take on the workers.
It is not perfect, but this is something that the GLAA is aware of. It cannot be that, today, you are working for them and, tomorrow, you are out of a job. There are efforts made to help workers retain some sense of continuity, although it may not be perfect.
Margaret Beels: The difficulty with that is that it does not cover the visa arrangements. That is about the work, but the sponsorship arrangements are separate.
Q121 Lord Colgrain: David, we have already touched on part of this, but what are the challenges in identifying and measuring the scale of labour market non-compliance?
David Neal: I am not sure that I can answer that. We looked at specific areas for this inspection. Perhaps colleagues either side might be better placed to do that. We have discussed some of the challenges, but I am not sure that I am best placed to answer that. I am sorry.
Margaret Beels: Shall I have a go?
Lord Colgrain: Yes, please.
Margaret Beels: I have a statutory responsibility to report on the extent of non-compliance. We use a variety of sources. We start with the intelligence reports of the three organisations. They are all collecting information about non-compliance, and we use that. I have a slight concern that it is about trying to drive the car forward while looking at what is in the rear-view mirror. How do we get it to a state of looking forward rather than relying on whatever intel has been gathered?
We have had a lot of information about the willingness or otherwise of workers to make complaints, and that is patchy. As part of producing my strategy, I go out on a call for evidence, which we try to extend to as many external stakeholders as possible. We ask them what evidence they have of labour exploitation. That is with a view to trying to determine the priorities in my strategy. We sit down, talk about them and kick ideas around.
Those are some attempts to get a better picture, but we know that it is imperfect. Our office is running a research project at the moment about the scale and nature of labour exploitation, particularly thinking about what we call precarious workers, who are workers who are non-unionised and who do not have regular contracts of employment that safeguard them.
This is going to be a survey that has as wide a reach as possible. Unfortunately, the results will not be available until towards the end of next year, but that reflects the fact that we are trying to go out widely and to use channels that charities and NGOs know about, so that we are not just using the established routes, to try to get a better picture.
Unannounced visits would be a good way of trying to get more information. It is imperfect, but that is the sort of stuff that we use to try to build up a picture about the scale and nature of labour exploitation. We tend to characterise it by sectors, because the conditions of working in those sectors make the risk of exploitation greater. Agriculture has, for a number of years, been a high-risk sector for us.
Q122 Lord Carter of Coles: We are all very struck by this. Margaret, how are the talks to create this single enforcement body progressing? Do we have a sense of it getting anywhere or that it might happen? Is there a timetable?
Margaret Beels: As Shakespeare wrote, “If you have tears, prepare to shed them now”.
Lord Carter of Coles: I suppose we should stop there, then.
Margaret Beels: It is a really important initiative and I refuse to lose sight of it, notwithstanding the fact that the Government tell us that there is no parliamentary time to create the body. I regret that. There are a number of important things that require primary legislation to deal with it. I am thinking about holiday pay and the enforcement of statutory sick pay and of employment tribunals. All those things need legislation, as does the creation of a new body.
Having stomped around, I then think, “What can I do? What are the things that maybe I could do that would achieve some of the good ambitions of the single enforcement body, notwithstanding the fact that there isn’t a single enforcement body?” For example, how could we become better at signposting the routes for workers to raise complaints? The idea of a single enforcement body was that you would have a brand and people would know where to go.
If we do not have that, how can we nevertheless make it easier for both workers and businesses? How can businesses find it easier to know what to do in order to be compliant? How can we get a better single picture, even if there is no body, of the extent of the risks? How can we get a better sharing of good practice? What works? Some really good work is done in each of the bodies. How can we share that good practice? How can we plan better collectively rather than each body having separate plans? How can we build up better links with other regulators?
I am trying to think of things that the single enforcement body would have brought that maybe can help make a difference, albeit there is not the statutory backing that is needed.
Q123 Baroness Fookes: Suzanne, what factors influence the decision to withdraw a licence from an operator under your control?
Suzanne McCarthy: The basic factor is that they are in breach of their licence. We have requirements that a licensee has to comply with. Before a licence is given, information is obtained and there may be inspections. When the first application comes in, the business probably has not started yet, so having an inspection when there is nothing there is not really as productive as having one when things are moving.
We have moved very much—the pandemic had an influence on this—towards licence applications being done online with the information provided by the proposed licensee. If there are issues that come up through that process, we may inspect or ask for more information at that stage. Most licence applications are granted.
It is afterwards when we might need to do compliance inspections, and we are trying to move more to those where we have pieces of intelligence. We go in and we inspect. It could be that the licensee is not fulfilling their requirements because they do not remember or they are careless, and we can correct that. We do not want to put people out of business if they do not need to be.
If we find that they are not paying holiday pay or not paying the wages that they should, that the accommodation is poor, or that they are discriminating—all the things that you heard in the previous panel—there will come a point where we will revoke the licence. We may then take other powers as well. For example, if they are labour providers rather than labour users, we might want to stop them providing labour because we have evidence of trafficking or other types of exploitation.
It is on a case-by-case basis, because we do not make sweeping changes, but, even though we are only 121, 75% of whom are out there doing things, we have an impact. We do not just work among ourselves. As we have heard from other members of the panel here and in the previous panel, this is a co-operative effort. This is a way of getting intelligence in and working together to get information out, not only to the workers but to labour providers and labour users.
I, for example, chair a quarterly webinar with labour providers and labour users, created by the GLAA, where we have over 100 attending. They range across all the different topics that you have been dealing with, and others. It is about getting information out there. It is also about using our resources in a way that really looks at the risk.
We are doing a lot more now on data analysis. The person sitting behind me has just been promoted to lead that, because we recognise that the intelligence that we get needs to be used intelligently. We need to focus on where the greatest risks are, because we do not have as much resource as we would like. We have what we have, and that should be focused, for example, on shellfish, if that is where we are seeing the most intelligence coming that there is something wrong.
Baroness Fookes: So you are punching above your weight.
Suzanne McCarthy: I hope so. We are punching very much above our weight. We should not leave it just above. We need to go even higher.
Q124 Lord Sahota: When a sponsor loses their licence, what happens to the workers? What about their rights and so on? Are they just sent away?
Suzanne McCarthy: If they have workers, the labour provider may be there. I have talked about what happens when it is a seasonal worker scheme. I do not have the information in front of me about what has happened in different instances, and I would be very happy to write to the committee and give you chapter and verse on that. I cannot give you the information that you want at this time. Margaret might be able to, because she used to be the chair of the GLAA, but I can say only that I will write to the committee, and the committee will get that information.
Margaret Beels: What you might be talking about is that they are licensed to be an operator under the seasonal worker scheme as opposed to their GLAA licence.
Suzanne McCarthy: I thought it was the GLAA licence that was being referred to. Is that correct?
Lord Sahota: Yes.
Suzanne McCarthy: I have commented on the seasonal worker one. On the GLAA one more generally, I can, as I said, arrange for information to be provided to the committee.
The Chair: Margaret, you know about the water sector.
Margaret Beels: Yes, indeed.
The Chair: In the retail sector, if a retailer fails, another retailer can take over that business.
Margaret Beels: I have thought about the “supplier of last resort” model. If a sponsor loses their licence, they will have a contractual arrangement with a farm to supply so many workers, so there will be a number of commercial contracts in place and there needs to be a process for evaluating that. You cannot have all the good contracts being transferred to one operator and the poorer contracts to another.
I can see that there needs to be some careful process, but there are two things about that. It needs to be there and to be understood, and the workers need to know what is going to happen to them from day one, not to be kept waiting for two months until that process has been invented and then acted upon.
Q125 Baroness Walmsley: Margaret, when are we going to get your labour market enforcement strategy for 2023-24? Can you give us any priorities that you have not already given in response to questions from my colleagues?
Margaret Beels: It was submitted by the deadline, which was 31 March, so it is with Ministers. I have tried to make it a bit easier, because, in past years, it has taken far too long, sometimes over a year, for this to be published. I am making it shorter, because it seems to me that, if a document is 150 pages, it is harder to get it through. I said 20 pages and we hit 24, but I think that is okay.
Last year’s strategy, which has just been published, had four themes. I thought it would probably be a good idea to carry on the themes, so that it is not changing from one year to the next. I am not allowed to tell you what is in the 2023-24 strategy, because it is still with Ministers, but I will tell you what the themes were in the last strategy, and they will be the same, which gives you a hint.
The first thing is a general heading of improving the radar. That is about making sure that the three bodies have the best-quality information available to them, both through their own intelligence gathering and through as many other sources as provide useful information to them, including third-party information, so that they are as well targeted as possible. That is really important.
The second is resources. My predecessors have said in the past, “We need more resources”, whether for the GLAA or otherwise, and, yes, they do. Are they going to get them? No, probably not. If we are not going to get them, the challenge is even stronger to us. What do we do with the resources we have? Are we constantly assessing whether we are making the best use of the resources we have? If there is a lesson to be learned over there, let us apply it. Let us have the bodies sharing that information. Suzanne has talked about compliance work. There is some excellent work being done by the national minimum wage team in the compliance field. The other bodies could be doing that and could be benefiting from that, having common campaigns and that sort of thing.
The third theme, which will probably resonate with this committee, is joined-up thinking. The bodies have statutory remits, and there is a risk of them falling into silos. Something might not be strictly a national minimum wage issue, a GLAA licence issue or an employment issue. What about all the things that fall in between? How can we be better joined up with other regulators that may have the relevant powers? It may be local authorities that have the relevant powers. How do we get a more joined-up approach to making sure that workers are not exploited?
The fourth theme is working with business so that workers are better informed. I am not naive. I know that having well-informed workers will not mean that all workers are treated properly, but it is an important first step for workers at least to know what their rights are, so that they can, if they feel able, raise them at the initial level. How do we improve worker knowledge, particularly among the more vulnerable and precarious workers? How do we work with businesses?
Statutory regulation is a very clunky business. In order to change any regulation, you have to have a consultation. You then have to have proposals. You have secondary legislation. There is a risk that you are addressing a problem that is two years old by the time that you have the relevant provisions on the statute book. We know that compliant businesses resent the fact that non-compliant businesses are stealing a march on them by not paying people properly, not observing the right environmental standards, or whatever it might be. There are a lot of businesses that want to work with us, so how can we best exploit that?
Those are the four themes: a better radar, making the best use of the resources with the most efficiency, joined-up thinking, and working with businesses and workers.
Baroness Walmsley: I will look forward to reading it. Thank you.
Margaret Beels: I am hoping for July, but I am not promising.
Suzanne McCarthy: As one of the organisations under Margaret, we are not waiting for Margaret’s brilliant plan for us to start working now on being more efficient and effective in what we can do at the GLAA. We have created a tactical operating model, which helps us with better intelligence and use of our intelligence to identify where, in fact, we have the greatest risks. We endorse everything that Margaret says, but we cannot just wait for that to come to fruition. As our own organisation, we have to be more efficient and effective in the way we operate.
Q126 The Chair: The final question comes to me. What is the one thing you would ask of government?
Margaret Beels: I am really interested in this committee’s remit. When I looked at the range of things that you are trying to come up with recommendations on, I thought, “Wow”. This business about being joined up really comes to bear. We have been talking about the seasonal worker visa scheme, which seems to me to be a classic smash between two government policies. You have a policy to control immigration and you have the need to provide the right number of workers, at the right time, in the right place, in a very competitive market where the weather changes.
For me, the single enforcement body is the step towards being better joined up. The initial idea of bringing together the three bodies is, to my mind, step one. Over time, the remit would expand so that more of the bodies that need to be in play to protect workers are brought into play. Please can we have a single enforcement body?
David Neal: From the evidence of our brief foray into this area, it is clarity in the roles and responsibilities.
The Chair: That was very brief. That was excellent.
Suzanne McCarthy: I will be equally brief. This is a government problem, in that things happen and we are forgotten or not fully consulted on them. We are the ones who have the front-line understanding, at the coalface, of workers and they are going through, and of labour providers and labour users. I would make a plea for good consultation in a timely manner and reflective on what should be here.
The Chair: Thank you very much indeed. Joined‑up government is beyond the remit of this committee, although we could try. Thank you very much for giving evidence today.
