The Gangmasters Licensing Authority has revoked the licence of a Birmingham gangmaster after finding multiple non-compliances and a previously twice-revoked gangmaster heavily involved in the running of the business.
Harjeet Singh, the director of HKM Solutions Ltd, who has now had its licence revoked, was previously a driver for a revoked gangmaster business run by Kashmir Singh, and workers and the GLA did not believe Harjeet Singh was the person running the business.
Mr Kashmir Singh had previously run gangmaster businesses Newtex Limited and New Horizons Personnel Limited, whose licenses were both revoked by the GLA, one of them for “persistent and systematic exploitation of the workers”.
Paul Whitehouse, chairman of the Gangmasters Licensing Authority said: “This looks like another case of an exploitative gangmaster trying to get back into the business. We have stopped many of these characters already and the message is that they are not welcome and will be stopped by the GLA.
“Workers in agriculture and the food industry are already in a safer place than other areas of the economy, thanks to the work of the GLA. We will not stop searching for the rogues and are already expanding our reach by working closely with the industry to find and block rogues from our regulated sectors.”
Harjeet Singh the named director of HKM Solutions failed the principal authority competence test and was declared “not fit and proper” to hold a licence due to: attempting to mislead GLA inspectors by stating Kashmir Singh who attended meetings on behalf of HKM Solutions with the labour user had no links to the business; a lack of paperwork; no evidence to suggest proper checks had been carried out when a worker who was not entitled to work in the UK was identified.
Further there were no draft contracts for workers and he failed to provide workers who were not familiar with the rules of driving in the UK any training. Futhermore, workers given the task of driving minibuses were not entitled to do so as their licences had a D101 restriction in place. The minibuses being used to transport workers did not have a Public Service Vehicles Operators licence. He also failed to co-operate with the labour user to ensure water was available to workers in the fields and first aid arrangements were inadequate. Although some six to eight accidents had occurred in the packhouse or fields including one worker being taken to hospital, no accidents had been investigated and no accident book was available for inspection. The contract for workers was out of date and did not show that the workers would now be paid by cheque instead of cash. The gangmaster also failed to retain records to show if workers received paid annual leave and he had not kept the GLA informed of a change of business address.
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