The number of potential victims of exploitation identified by the UK regulator more than doubled to 15,186, the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority (GLAA) says in its latest annual report.
While, like the Security Industry Authority (SIA), the GLAA falls politically under the Home Office, the report notes government proposals to bring together it and others in a Single Enforcement Body (SEB): the Employment Agency Standards Inspectorate from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and HM Revenue and Customs’s National Minimum Wage team.
In a foreword to the document, the chair Margaret Beels and interim chief executive Ziggy MacDonald say: “We believe that by raising awareness amongst workers, educating businesses and helping signpost people to the right information, this can and will make a difference in helping reduce forced and compulsory labour.”
The GLAA began after the deaths of Chinese cockleshell pickers in Morecambe Bay, as the Gangmasters Licensing Authority. While it still licenses some 1000 gangmasters, its remit has widened; in 2016 it got powers, in England and Wales only, against labour abuse in the wider labour market, not just in the regulated sectors of agriculture, food and food processing; although in Scotland and Northern Ireland the remit remains as pre-2016. Such labour market offences may include withholding holiday pay or ‘serious Modern Slavery offences in which criminals seek to exploit human assets for profit’.
As a further sign of how labour exploitation might be across the wider economy, the report speaks of a focus on ‘Textile and Hospitality Protocol groups’.
As the report states, operational GLAA staff work ‘as first responders in contact with potential victims’; the report says that the GLAA also needs ‘to find new ways to engage with communities’. “This is essential to raise the awareness of workers as to what behaviours constitute exploitation, breaching their fundamental rights …” the report says.
The Authority has its head office in Nottingham; at the peak of the initial outbreak of coronavirus, GLAA says, it ‘prioritised high harm activity’, but has ‘quickly returned to full field operations’. While the report speaks of ‘relatively small enforcement resources in the UK’, it points to a 26 per cent increase in the number of investigations led by the GLAA, with near half, 47 per cent of all cases investigated being multi-agency partnerships. As an example of its work, the GLAA with the crime reporting charity Crimestoppers told job-seekers about fake recruitment adverts on Facebook. “We identified that gangs have been running ads through the social media network targeting young Romanian men. The adverts promote job opportunities for highly paid labour/construction work in London,” work that however did not exist.
As for the ‘post-Brexit world’, the report says it ‘has begun to present new challenges for us in relation to our liaison with other countries’; notably other non-European Union (EU) countries.
