As its compliance team begins the task of enforcing the new gangmaster regulations, Gangmaster Licensing Authority chief executive Mike Wilson said this morning [Friday] that the problem of monitoring of labour provision from outside the UK remains unsolved.

Sunday October 1 represents the cut-off point for gangmasters providing labour into the UK agriculture and food processing sectors to have gained GLA certification for their ongoing businesses. Wilson said there has been significant progress in the UK, since applications were first accepted in April, but admitted concern about the GLA’s capacity to implement its regulations internationally, particularly in EU accession states.

“A lot of the exploitation of labour actually occurs in the foreign country before they come to the UK to work,” said Wilson. “People are arriving in this country and being treated properly here, but they are already in debt, owing as much as £1,500. This is an area where we don’t have all the bases covered, but we are working directly with the authorities in the relevant countries to tackle it.”

He added, however, that sectors addressed by the GLA have already seen a certain amount of self-cleansing as illegal operators see the net closing in around them. “A lot has happened in the last two years,” he said. “Smaller gangmasters have aggregated or combined, others have been displaced and moved to other areas of activity.”

Wilson estimates that because of the changes, there are now between 200 and 300 gangmasters in the UK that have chosen to attempt to stay under the radar, while around 1,000 have GLA licenses. “I don’t think it will take us very long to identify [the illegal operators]. The intelligence we have already collected, along with the feedback from workers, legal labour providers and other parts of the supply chain will assist us in that,” he said. “”We will get the message out there very soon that the worst operators are being tackled and I hope the rest will then come into line or get out of the industry.”

Anecdotal evidence illustrates that the construction and hotel industries have been the unfortunate recipients of the burden, but Jack Dromey, deputy general secretary of the T&G Union, said: “We would like to see all illegal gangmasters tackled in time, but first we need to make a success of the licensing regime in food and agriculture.

“It will take time to track down all of the rogues, but the message to them today is ‘your days are numbered’.”

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