14
Examination of witness
Emiliano Mellino, Vadim Sardov, Andrey Okhrimenko and Sybil Msezane.
Q202 The Chair: Thank you very much for joining us this morning, and for joining us remotely. Please introduce yourselves and set out your experience—briefly, as we will go into deeper questions—of seasonal work in the horticultural sector.
Sybil Msezane: Hi, everybody. I am from South Africa and last year I worked at three farms, in Surrey, Staffordshire and somewhere in the north—I cannot remember where. Two were berry farms and the one in Staffordshire was a vegetable farm. Last year was the first time that South Africans were recruited on to the seasonal work programme. We came through Concordia, a UK-based recruiter, which works with CVPlacements, a South Africa-based recruitment agency.
Emiliano Mellino: I am a journalist with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the UK’s biggest non-profit investigative newsroom. Over the last year, I worked on five investigations into the seasonal worker visa scheme. Most recently, we published three investigations as a series in March and April. As part of that, we spoke to nearly 50 workers who came on to the scheme in 2022. They talked to us about issues including wage theft, bullying, being punished by being denied work, unsafe and unhygienic accommodation, and a whole range of things that we can go into in more detail about later.
Andrey Okhrimenko: Hello, everyone. Nice to see you. I am from Kazakhstan. I am here because I participated in the government-sponsored seasonal worker pilot programme in 2022. I worked as a soft fruit picker at EC Drummond, a Homme Soft Fruit Ltd farm. My sponsor was AG Recruitment. Thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to tell you my experience today.
Vadim Sardov: Hello, everyone. Good morning, nice to see all of you. I am from Kazakhstan. I participated in a seasonal work programme last year, working in a vegetable packhouse named UK Salads, located in Roydon, Essex. Eventually, I had to leave that place and the UK because of serious problems with accommodation and working conditions. I tried to contact my sponsor at AG Recruitment but they said, “There’s nothing we can offer. You have only two options: stay where you are now or get back to your home country”. I ended up leaving the UK.
Q203 Lord Carter of Coles: Thank you all for making yourselves available, which is much appreciated. How were you treated, valued and respected by farm owners, packers and the general public?
Sybil Msezane: I do not think the farmers even knew we existed outside the weight of fruit or vegetables that we picked on a daily basis. From my experience, we were not viewed as humans. We were more chattel on the farms. In the mornings, when we met to start the day, we were even called by numbers. For me, that is not how you treat the people you employ, not even bothering to get to know their names. The first farm I was at had a board where your number was put up to tell you which field you would work on. That gives you a picture of the kind of places we worked. We were just numbers. I previously worked in the US with young people who were incarcerated, and that was the kind of behaviour used in a prison system, where people are numbers and not human beings with names.
When you got ill or needed support from the farm or its staff, there were often excuses. I admit, at least in the first farm I was at, that there was a level of responsiveness. If people were ill, they would be taken to the farm. That was not my experience at the two other farms, where there was a very different level of responsiveness. They even expected six or eight grown adults to share very small caravans. That shows the value they put on the people who worked on the farms. They expected strangers who did not know each other to share accommodation. Most of that was mixed accommodation between men and women.
If you were a seasonal worker, compared with workers who came more regularly and had been on the farm for a number of years, the kind of treatment was very different. I had a cousin who worked on a farm and experienced sexual harassment. Even with recordings and other evidence, nothing was done. She was made out to be in the wrong because the person sexually harassing her was a returning worker who had been on the farm for more than 10 years. There was definitely no human element from the farm owners. We did not really interact much with the public. I do not think people saw behind the hedges where we worked. They just saw the fruit or vegetables that landed on their tables or in their stores.
Andrey Okhrimenko: Speaking of the general public, I believe our job was well respected because we worked in their best interests. The fruits we picked would eventually appear on British tables. With farm management and owners, it was quite the opposite. During the whole employment, we received threats. For example, “If you don’t pick fast enough, if you don’t comply with quality or you do something wrong we don’t like, we will cancel your visa and send you back to your home country. We may apply some deductions to your wages as a disciplinary measure”. All those things basically happened every day, in the meetings before work or during breaks. It was pretty damaging. We had extremely bad living conditions. We had problems with working conditions. During the whole employment, in one way or another we were disrespected and manipulated.
Vadim Sardov: In my case we packed vegetables that ended up on the shelves of Aldi and Spar supermarkets. There was not even a bit of respect. Instead, the manager of UK Salads, Jamal Lafria, was always telling us that he could easily change us, and if we did not like something he could call our sponsor, AG Recruitment, and tomorrow it would send him new people instead of us. He knew that our sponsor had a lot of people without a job and that we would not get a new one. He used that fact to manipulate us. He told us, “I’m trying to run a business here”. With that threat, you can justify any lawlessness. Every morning, he told us, “You have to remember the rule: if you’re not happy here, you can leave”. This is the way we were treated during my work experience at UK Salads.
Emiliano Mellino: I have heard similar things to what Sybil, Andrey and Vadim said from other workers. These are by no means isolated cases. That you should be referred to as a number, as Sybil mentioned, and the threats spoken of by Vadim and Andrey were relayed to us by other workers on several other farms.
Another point is the pressure of speed that a lot of workers felt. There is tremendous pressure to pick as fast as possible. A common punishment for not picking fast enough, which we heard about in at last seven farms, is that if in the first three hours you do not hit your targets, you are refused work for the rest of the day, so you cannot earn for the rest of the day. This is a huge punishment, because a lot of workers come here with tremendous debts. We can go into that a bit later. People rack up tremendous debts to come to the UK and work on this programme. If they are then punished by not being allowed to work, they cannot pay back their debts. That was one of the main ways in which workers were pressured, as well as being shouted at in the fields by supervisors and managers to pick faster, and at times being insulted.
Baroness Willis of Summertown: If somebody was removed from work for the rest of the day, did they bring someone else in to do that work?
Emiliano Mellino: No. There is fruit to be picked, but it is not picked because the person is sanctioned in that way.
Baroness Willis of Summertown: Presumably, that also impacts the person who needs the fruit to be picked.
Sybil Msezane: I can talk about this from my experience. That means that the rest of the people left on the field are then pressurised to pick more. One of the things we were told when we were being recruited was that we would get training when we arrived. I was put on to a field on my very first day and had to distinguish between orange, red and pink strawberries and know which was ripe and ready for market. When I did not know that, I was taken off the field and told that I did not know how to do my job. I was like, “But you said there would be training”. When you got to the farm, they would say, “We don’t know who told you that, but you need to be picking to meet the target of crates for that particular day”.
Q204 Lord Sahota: Thank you, everyone. My question is in two parts. First, how did you become a seasonal worker? Of course, you were looking for a job and you became a seasonal worker. Secondly, I want to concentrate on your experience of the recruitment process in your own country. Could you first deal with how you became a seasonal worker and then the recruitment process in your own country, which must be quite an experience?
Sybil Msezane: I had been looking for work abroad. At the end of Covid, there were many challenges in South Africa. I came across the seasonal work programme in 2021 when it was being expanded outside the eastern European countries from where traditionally people mostly came to the UK. In April 2022, CVPlacements put out ads, mostly on Facebook, recruiting for the UK, working in partnership in Concordia. I applied and was told it would be unskilled work. There was no age limit. Like I said earlier, I was told we would be trained to do the work once we got to the UK. CVPlacements was the South Africa-based partner for the UK, with Concordia.
I applied to CVPlacements and just sent in my CV. Then they started a screening process. I think the interview phone call took less than 10 minutes. You were told that you would be issued with a CoS. They asked for a copy of your passport to see that it was valid. They told you that as part of the programme you did not need to pay anything to anyone, but you needed the equivalent of £1,270 in your bank account or someone who would sponsor you for that amount. That had to be in the bank account for at least 30 days before you applied for your visa. In that sense, it was a straightforward and fair process.
Once you were issued with a farm, you got the CoS and then you could apply for a visa independently. In my case, and I know in a lot of others, they did not offer a service to facilitate your visa. Once we were on the farms and talking to people from other countries, I learned that they were told that they had to pay facilitation fees but you could directly apply on the UKVI website and submit all your documentation. For us in South Africa, my experience was that you submitted your CV, had your interview with CVPlacements, were issued with a CoS and you then uploaded your information on to the Concordia website to be a Concordia employee or recruit. Then you applied to UKVI, were issued with your visa and were able to travel to the UK.
Lord Sahota: Vadim, how did you become a seasonal worker? What was your experience of recruitment in your country?
Vadim Sardov: I found information about this project on the internet. Then I contacted AG Recruitment and was sent a few instructions that I followed. Everything was pretty normal. There is nothing to tell you about, I guess.
Lord Sahota: It was quite simple and straightforward.
Vadim Sardov: Yes.
Andrey Okhrimenko: I agree that the whole process was pretty straightforward. Basically, you need an international passport and a criminal check certificate. You contact the representative of the sponsor in your region or country and they send you instructions about what you have to do and what papers you must fill in, such as the application form. The main problem is that usually farms are allocated to participants randomly. You do not get to choose; you just get the farm they give you. If, for example, you ask for a different farm or to have a choice, they may not let you be part of the programme. Once you complete the necessary forms, they issue you a certificate of sponsorship, which you need to apply for a visa. You do that independently via the UK Visas and Immigration service. Then you get a visa and come to the UK. That is basically it.
Lord Sahota: Was the cost something you could afford?
Sybil Msezane: For me, yes. I know some people who were part of our programme borrowed money to come. As part of the interview process, you were given an idea of what to expect to be paid per hour. People made decisions based on what they expected to make per hour and how many hours they expected to work per day or week to be able to repay those loans. I was fortunate enough to not have those challenges.
Lord Sahota: Vadim, was cost an issue?
Vadim Sardov: I just paid for everything. I did not get any loans. I paid for the ticket and the visa. That was all.
Andrey Okhrimenko: I paid with my own money for the visa and the return tickets. The visa is quite pricey. I do not understand why a worker must pay that amount of money if he works in the best interests of the country he is coming to. Some people face challenges to pay all this money. In different regions and countries, under similar programmes, the farm in the country you are going to will cover your tickets and visa expenses. The UK does not work that way, unfortunately.
Lord Sahota: Emiliano, do you have anything to add?
Emiliano Mellino: As you can imagine, not many workers are willing to speak on the record and show their face. Those who pay unlawful recruitment fees tend to be more scared and are less likely to show up. It is great that Sybil, Andrey and Vadim have shown up, but of the cohort of people we spoke to, many of them did so on condition of anonymity. Among them there were many who paid recruitment fees. In total, they would have paid £5,000 or more to come to the UK, between recruitment fees, flights and the visa costs. Many of those workers are still paying off those debts today.
Even workers who did not pay illegal recruitment fees—some from South Africa—and just paid flights, the visa and other associated costs, such as taking a cab from the airport, took on debts that they are still paying off. They went to unofficial moneylenders who charged them very high interest rates. Cost is an overarching issue that we see in many countries. We spoke a lot about Nepal and Indonesia previously, where people pay illegal recruitment fees, but it happens elsewhere. Costs are very high elsewhere, as well.
Another issue with recruitment is that in general there are poor comms from the Government on what is going on. There used to be a website where you could see the four scheme operators—the four government-licensed sponsors. You cannot find a website like that any more. There is no government website where you can find that list of names. There is no page where you can see which countries we recruit from, or even a list of all the subcontractors that the scheme operators use. Every scheme operator will have several subcontractors in each country. That information void opens up a space for exploitative people to take advantage of people who are trying to come to the UK and do not know how. I have had cases where workers ask me, because they have seen my name online in relation to the articles, how to come to the UK on a visa. They cannot find any decent, official information on it. Facebook and TikTok become the avenues where people learn about the scheme. Obviously, information can be patchy and at times it can lead to exploitation.
Q205 Baroness Fookes: Turning to the position of people now working on a farm, however they got there, if you experienced any work-related issues, would you know where to find help, or whether help was actually available? Sybil, you mentioned the lack of training, for example. Would you know where to go to get help with that?
Sybil Msezane: I was at an advantage coming into the work because of my background. I was able to research information. For instance, when we worked ungodly hours, up to 18 hours a day, the Just Good Work app tells you that you should be able to get at least eight to 10 hours’ sleep per night. That was not what was happening because we were working up to 18-hour days. I approached ACAS. Then you were told, “Actually, when you signed the documentation during induction you signed away your rights”. You were given a whole bunch of papers and told, “Sign here”. It was okay for you to work more than 60 hours a week and there was no recourse because you had agreed to that.
When I was moved to the second farm, I refused to sign. I was like, “I’m not going to work more than 48 hours”. Then you got questioned, “Why aren’t you going to work more than 48 hours?” I was like, “Because I now know that if I sign this I have no rights”. You could only do that if you had access to information and were willing to research it. It is not just willingness but the ability to research. Because the work is advertised as unskilled, you have a variety of people with different knowledge bases. A lot of people ended up getting exploited because they did not have the knowledge base and did not know how to exercise their rights. It was difficult if you did not know how to access information. It was not readily given by the employer. In most farms, you did not even know who the HR manager was. You had to look for that information if you needed it. Often it was not readily accessible.
Andrey Okhrimenko: How to put this into words? The only advice we were given was first to contact the sponsor if we had any problems. We were not given any information on how to contact any other institution—for example, a government-related agency. I believe they always want to keep the problem within their hands. Many people are afraid that, if they contact the farm or sponsor regarding some issue or problem, they might lose their job and not be provided with another, and eventually they would have to leave the country. There is no chance of changing sponsor or employer if you are unhappy, and your sponsor does not give you a green light.
Vadim Sardov: In my case, our sponsor did not give us any names of special organisations. That was a big problem. People are unaware what to do in a situation where their sponsor cannot help them. They could only give us the advice that, “If you don’t like something, you can get back to your home country. Accept that”. As Emiliano mentioned, people were always under pressure. Someone was always shouting at workers. Even when workers contacted AG Recruitment, they would then contact our farm or packhouse but it did not help. It was even worse. We were told, “If you complain again, you will be fired and you will have to go back home”.
Baroness Fookes: Emiliano, I imagine you endorse what has been said by the various witnesses today.
Emiliano Mellino: Yes. I mentioned that in our last investigation we spoke to nearly 50 workers. More than half of them told us they had problems making complaints or that the complaints they made were not addressed. As Vadim said, the best outcome you could get was to complain to your sponsor, who would then transfer you to another farm, if you had a problem with the farm; but that would never resolve the underlying issue. When you guys had the session with the director of Labour Market Enforcement, she mentioned that that is how the scheme is designed. If someone has a problem with a farm, they talk to their sponsor, their scheme operator, and get a transfer, or the problem is addressed. Within that mechanism, there is a problem. There is a conflict of interest. The scheme operators make their money because farms pay them for each worker supplied. The worker is supposed to complain about the farm to the scheme operator who makes money from that farm. The farm is their customer. Within that, there is a clear conflict of interest.
There are a couple of other cases where workers spoke to me about complaints they had made and the outcomes. A South African woman who worked with Sybil on one farm sent a six-page complaint to Concordia regarding issues such as bullying and shouting by supervisors, punishment by being denied work—as I mentioned earlier—and having allergic reactions. She never got a response from Concordia to that complaint. A Nepalese worker I spoke to last year, Surya, arrived in August. Six weeks later, he and several others were told there was no work left at the farm. About 16 Nepali workers had that problem. They contacted AG Recruitment, asked for a transfer and were told that no transfers were available. They said, “In that case, we’re not leaving”. AG Recruitment responded to them, in an email I have seen: “If you don’t show us your return tickets, we will blacklist you and let all the other scheme operators know. You will never work in the UK again”. That is the kind of response workers got when they complained. In Surya’s case, he is still in Nepal. He took on a lot of debt to come here, was not able to work a full season and had to leave after a few weeks because of that. He has still not paid back his debt and has more than £2,000 to pay back. He does not know how he will do that. Nobody has offered to compensate him.
Baroness Fookes: What is your solution? Have you got one?
Emiliano Mellino: Yes, there are two things in the particular case with Surya. One is the employer pays principle, an internationally recognised principle with regard to international recruitment that states that employers should pay for the flights, visas and so on for workers to come and work on their sites. Several other countries follow the employer pays principle with their international recruitment schemes and agricultural recruitment schemes.
The other solution to this particular issue would be a guarantee of work. There needs to be a guarantee of work. When workers come here, they should be guaranteed that they will be given work for a certain amount of time—every week or the majority of weeks they are here. If that work is not given, there has to be some kind of safety net. These workers pay taxes and national insurance but are on what is called no recourse to public funds. They cannot access state benefits; they are not allowed to, even though they pay national insurance and taxes. They need a safety net if they end up without work.
Q206 Baroness Buscombe: You have given damning evidence uniformly so far. I want to drill down a little further. More than 40,000 visas will be issued this year alone. Emiliano, you interviewed 50 workers. We have heard and read about other farmers who pay for their seasonal workers to come to this country, so I am not sure that uniformly people pay that themselves. Given the two solutions you had in mind, could you comment on that? It is also important to understand why people keep coming back. Sybil, you talked about people coming back over 10 years. I do not know how often your cousin came back, having been through that harassment, or whether that was the last time she came. Have any of you worked on farms in your own or other countries to compare your experience, to know and understand how you are treated there? It is important to get a balanced response.
Emiliano Mellino: There are different kinds of experience on different farms. By no means are the cases we have talked about what went on everywhere. Some workers said they had good experiences and others bad. The same worker transferring to different farms might have some good and some bad experiences. The workers we spoke to worked on more than 20 farms across the UK. I never heard of farmers paying for the flights or visas of workers on the scheme to come here. I am not saying that is not the case but I never heard it.
On why people return, as I mentioned, some people have good experiences. Other people will return even if they do not have good experiences because they still have debts to pay back. Also, we have to be honest: in a lot of the countries they come from, the situation can be bad. There can be high unemployment and it can be difficult to find work, and it is possible to earn more here.
To finish that, in terms of organising a scheme and a recruitment system, even if some people have a good experience, we cannot accept any proportion of people having a bad experience. There needs to be more research, and more transparency from government about what is going on so that we can get a full picture. At the moment, there is very little transparency—for example, the annual surveys of the scheme that the Government were supposed to release, it's not happened.
Baroness Buscombe: This is really important. Sybil, you are now a care worker here, so you came back.
Sybil Msezane: I came back to a totally different sector. I think it would be the choice of a lot of people who can come back to the UK to do so on a different kind of visa, not necessarily under the horticultural scheme. That is for many reasons, as Emiliano said. I do not come from an agricultural background. The scheme is advertised as an unskilled worker position. That is one of many reasons why a lot of people apply to come and work through the scheme.
The discrepancies between how much £10 is worth here and in South Africa makes it viable for a lot of people who decide to come in under the scheme. It was run for the first time with South Africa, so none of the people who came last year had been on the programme before. Some people have come back and others are considering that. Most hope to go to different farms, depending on their experiences. As Emiliano said, and at least in how we are recruited from South Africa, the farmer does not pay. You pay to come and work in the UK. There is no offer to pay. I did a lot of research on this when I decided to come via Concordia and when looking to come back on a UK Skilled Worker visa. In the agricultural sector in particular, very few farmers or programmes pay for people to come to the UK.
Q207 Baroness Jones of Whitchurch: Can I move the discussion on to the accommodation you stayed in? Sybil, you have already told us a little bit. Could each of you describe your actual accommodation? Was it typical? Was there better accommodation on site but they put the new starters in the worst accommodation and if you came back often enough you would get an upgrade? Could you move freely and go into local towns? Did you have to stay on the farm or could you move around, perhaps to go to the local supermarket and buy food, rather than eat the food the farmer offered? It is just a little snapshot of the living rather than working conditions.
Sybil Msezane: First, the farmer did not provide food. You bought all your own food. You would go into town to the supermarket. I had three very different experiences. At the first farm I was in, in Surrey, they provided transport to the supermarket three days a week. Obviously, you could also get food delivered, however you wanted to do that. On your off-days you were able to go into the local town or come into London. It was not slave labour where you could not move about. The second farm also provided transport, but only once a week. The third farm did not provide transport at all to the supermarket.
The physical accommodation on all three farms was caravans. At the first farm, we had seven people in our caravan. One person slept in what should have been the communal dining room area. There were three bedrooms, but they were smaller than the size of the area in front of me here and were shared between two people. We had both men and women in our caravan. Initially, we had six South Africans in our caravan. Then they brought in non-South Africans, so we had to contend with the challenge of language. In that caravan, we all had to share one standard refrigerator, not even a double-door one and, like this year’s heat, the heat was horrendous last year. If there was not enough space to store your food in the refrigerator, it went bad. There was a single shower—a very small one—in one bathroom of six of us to share. It was less than adequate, especially for certain adults.
Baroness Jones of Whitchurch: Vadim, very briefly, what was your accommodation like? Was it typical of what else happened on the farm?
Vadim Sardov: My accommodation was the worst part of my story. I lived in a building called a caravan. There was no central heating. We could use only electrical heaters and we had to pay for electricity. The place was old, full of cracks and holes. It was useful to keep heaters turned on all the time. I had to sleep in a jacket because sometimes the temperature inside the caravan was the same as outside. One day, it was 8 degrees. I was afraid almost every night that when I fell asleep I might not wake up if the heaters turned off. Women from other caravans had to sleep cuddled together because it was too cold.
Baroness Jones of Whitchurch: Did you share your caravan with other people?
Vadim Sardov: Yes. In my caravan there were four people. Our working place was a big refrigerator and our living space was as cold. People were always sick. They still had to come to work and pack all the food, while sick. Afterwards, the food was transferred to the UK supermarket. I guess that is not so good.
Andrey Okhrimenko: My experiences were very similar. We were in caravans, too. The caravans themselves were all right and quite well maintained. The main problem was cold. The farm did not have enough heaters. They had a limited amount and would give, for example, only one for a whole caravan that might have three separate rooms. It was really cold. Then we were transferred to a hostel, a dormitory building. That was also cold. There was a heating system but most of the time it did not work properly, because, as far as I understand, the farm was trying to save money. They did not keep it switched on all the time so as not to spend too much money on heating.
The sanitary conditions in the hostel I lived in were appalling. It was disgusting. Everything was falling apart, with mouldy walls and floors, broken pipes and running water from the toilet. Visiting the bathroom during my stay at that hostel was an extremely bad experience. We asked the guy responsible from the farm, the HR manager as I understood it, to pay us a visit. We had to report any issues to him, but he rarely tried to solve any of the problems.
Baroness Jones of Whitchurch: Thank you. Emiliano wants to say something.
Emiliano Mellino: A very quick thing. You have to realise that workers pay a lot of money for these caravans. Last year, it was between £60 and £85 per week, more or less, with six people sharing the space. Altogether, they paid about £1,500 or £2,000 a month for a space smaller than a one-bedroom flat. Also, several women who shared caravans with men said they felt unsafe because their doors did not have locks. I spoke to at least four workers who were told that they had to share a bed with a stranger. It was a stranger of the same gender, but there was only a double bed in the room and they had to share it with someone they did not know.
Q208 Baroness Walmsley: My question is about wages. Andrey, how was your experience of receiving wages? Did you receive the right pay? Did you receive it on time? Did you have to have it paid it into a bank account or was there any other way of being paid?
Andrey Okhrimenko: We received our wages to our bank accounts, which the farm usually opened for us. Usually, that is one of the ways they make additional profit from us. They used affiliated payment systems—I would not say the banks—that charged a lot of fees for everything we did, whether we wanted to change money, make a transfer, withdraw money or send it online. It was a rip-off for the workers. Of course, you could open an ordinary account in a UK bank. That is what I and many of my colleagues did. We received our money in our bank account. They paid every week. We did not experience any delay in payments. Everything was on time on the given day.
During my employment, while we were working we were always threatened that there would be deductions from our wages. If we did not comply with farm rules, pick fast enough or comply with quality, they might charge us. They gave out strikes. For each strike you got during your working day, they would deduct 30 minutes from your day shift. For example, if I was working for eight hours on a given day and I got two strikes, they would deduct one hour from my working shift and I would get less money. I would work eight hours and receive pay for only seven.
Vadim Sardov: My experience was the same. My employer also offered to open some strange bank account and payment system for us that had a lot of fees. It was possible to open other bank accounts. Otherwise, I did not have any problems receiving payments. It was on a weekly basis. I have nothing to complain about.
Sybil Msezane: I had a bit of a strange issue when I first started. I already had a bank account because I had lived in the UK on a two-year working visa many years ago. Because I did not use their payment system, I was not uploaded on to the payment system until my third week there. When you were recruited you were told you would be paid from the first week you worked. Only when you arrived were you told that you would be paid in lieu. You worked and then you were paid after the second week, but you were still charged rent from the first week. Those were some of the challenges when I first arrived. It took quite a lot to fix. I had to keep going back to say, “I still haven’t received my salary. I have given you my banking details three times”. Once that was done, I received my salary on time.
Baroness Walmsley: But there was no warning that you would have to survive for two weeks and pay rent before you were paid.
Sybil Msezane: No.
Baroness Walmsley: Emiliano, is that common?
Emiliano Mellino: We spoke to a few workers who had pay issues. In the case of one particular farm, EU Plants Ltd, we wrote about this quite extensively. We spoke to several workers there who were not being paid for all their hours. That seemed to happen quite regularly on that farm. One worker told us that she worked for nearly a month and was paid only £400. Another worked there for two months and by the end of that was owed more than £1,000 that they had not paid her. They both complained, as did several other workers at that farm, to AG Recruitment. As I mentioned earlier, they were transferred to another farm but nothing was done to recover the wages they were owed.
Q209 Baroness Willis of Summertown: The next question is really just for Emiliano. How easy is it to get this information? I would like to look at the other side of it as well. What could we do to make it easier for people to access information and for you to be able to check that things are not going in the wrong direction? I think that is the best way of putting it.
Emiliano Mellino: It is not easy. A lot of people, even those who want to speak up, do not because they fear repercussions. One of the benefits of working at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism is that we have a lot of time. We can spend time building trust and ensuring that workers are safeguarded. Sometimes in journalism things can backfire, so we have to make sure that workers are safe when they speak to us.
One of the main things we need is more transparency from government. That is hugely lacking. We have requested inspection reports from government—because the Government do inspections. We have made freedom of information requests that were refused. We are now appealing that with the Information Commissioner’s Office. As I mentioned earlier, the Government are supposed to release a review of the scheme. They released the review of the 2019 scheme in 2021, on the afternoon of Christmas Eve, which is obviously not a time when a lot of journalists pay attention to what comes out. The Government said that reviews of subsequent years—2020 and 2021—would be completed by April. They have not been released. More than a month ago, we asked for those reviews of the scheme. They have not given them to us but have asked for another extension.
Similarly, the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority recently announced that it had signed a bilateral agreement with Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan to ensure safer recruitment. We asked for a copy of that agreement and it refused to give it to us. As you can imagine, it is important for us to see the details of those kinds of agreements to make sure of what is and is not in them and how workers are safeguarded, and to communicate that to workers so that workers know how they are being safeguarded. The GLAA website used to be updated with all the compliance visits it does. There has not been a single compliance visit listed on the GLAA website for 2023 and we are now half way through the year.
Q210 Lord Colgrain: We are concluding this evidence session, so I will ask two questions together. Is there anything about the seasonal worker scheme you would like to tell us that we have not asked? If you could suggest one recommendation for this committee to make to the Government, what would it be?
Sybil Msezane: I will start with the second question. It is important to cut out the middleman. Most UK-based scheme operators have websites. That was not the case in the South African experience, but I worked with many workers from other countries who had to incur debt and were exploited in the process. Like I said, it was a very straightforward process applying for the visa once you were given a CoS. People should not have to incur debt to come and work in this country. One thing that would make it easier would be that, as with other UK worker visas or Skilled Worker visas, you apply directly to your employer, are given a CoS and are then able to come and work in this country. That makes it easier and you do not have to rely on someone who benefits from your employer to not answer any complaints you have. I would do that and unionise farm workers.
It is quite shocking to me coming from South Africa, a heavily unionised country. Farm workers have been unionised in South Africa since the early 1990s. Having worked on various other work-related programmes with unions and in the agricultural sector, I was shocked to find that in 2022 in the UK there were no unions. The kinds of laws and treatment you have on farms in the UK is far worse than that experienced in South Africa.
Vadim Sardov: The main thing is that employers must provide proper living and working conditions. No one is asking for five-star hotels. Everything just has to be decent. There have to be temperature limits, for example. The temperature inside accommodation cannot be lower than 18 degrees, for example. Caravans are summer houses and it is not acceptable to use them during the cold season.
Before sending people to work, employers and sponsors must be sure that everything is according to the rules. Otherwise people will have to leave that place and start working illegally. They spend a lot of money to get to the UK and pay for a visa. When I worked at UK Salads, around five people decided to leave that place and start working illegally in London. That is the case.
Andrey Okhrimenko: I completely agree with Vadim about living conditions. A caravan is basically a place you can be during summer and probably autumn, but not during the winter. In terms of weather, the United Kingdom is not Spain. The Government should create some kind of law that would force farmers to build hostels and community buildings where people will feel safe.
Of course, there are a lot of things to say about the problems we all face as seasonal workers, but we do not have enough time. I suggest that, if you have the chance, you read all the articles that Emiliano wrote regarding seasonal workers. He did an enormous job and is probably one of the first journalists who really started to dig up this problem and bring public attention to it. Thank you, Emiliano.
Lord Colgrain: Emiliano, do you want the final say?
Emiliano Mellino: I agree with Andrey. Two things are linked. First, we need stronger labour enforcement. There is an International Labour Organization standard on the number of labour inspectors a country needs. The UK has just over a quarter of that number. Secondly, we must delink labour enforcement from immigration enforcement. Andrey mentioned earlier how immigration enforcement was used as a threat to workers, that they would lose their visas if they did not comply. We heard similar things from other workers who were threatened with deportation. In some cases, they were reported as absconders when they were not. We need to delink labour enforcement from immigration enforcement and have those as separate entities, so that workers feel safe to come forward to labour enforcement agencies.
The Chair: Thank you. That almost concludes our session. I thank Sybil, Andrey and Vadim especially for standing up for other people who did not have the opportunity or ability to speak in front of the committee. We thank you for your time and for presenting to us today.
