Margaret Beels struggles to hide her frustration. Shocking revelations about the exploitation of vulnerable workers emerge on an all-too-frequent basis, the latest being more than 50 Indian students working in Welsh care homes who had wages withheld or underpaid.
Yet despite the depressing frequency of these occurrences, several initiatives intended to tackle such egregious problems have been caught in parliamentary gridlock. It is clear that modern slavery remains embedded in British life six years after ministers created a workers’ rights tsar.
Beels, who is the government’s director of labour market enforcement, says exploitation in the care sector and among migrant agricultural workers are at the top of her list of concerns. She is a career civil servant, well schooled in diplomacy, but admits the watchdogs she oversees are understaffed and that the system is plagued by gaps that can be exploited – whether that be the complex definitions of employment status, the supervision of umbrella companies, or holiday pay.
She says her role is a bit like being “a lightning conductor” for those who feel exploited at work. Asked if there are enough inspectors, she says with typical understatement: “We have got about a quarter of the International Labour Organization’s recommendations in terms of inspectors, and by that yardstick you can say: no, there isn’t. It is hard not to say more resources would result in more things being done.”
Beels told a recent parliamentary committee that it was “not entirely my experience” that workers’ rights were improving under the current regime.
“The government has a strong agenda about growth,” she tells the Observer. “In my view growth can only be achieved with a workforce being looked after properly.”
She believes social care is a “big, big issue”. The government has attempted to deal with worker shortages by extending international working visa schemes in this and other sectors, but Beels says such extensions have the potential to create their own sets of problems. After last year’s rapid extension of the seasonal visa scheme for people picking fruit and vegetables, for example, it emerged some workers had been forced to pay finder’s fees to brokers in their home country to secure their UK roles.
Beels says: “At the last count, in the summer, people were coming [to join the agricultural scheme] from I think 52 countries. It is not possible to police what is going on upstream from the UK.”
It was hoped that reforms would be included in a long-promised employment bill, but the government has failed to present it in successive parliaments. While some improvements, such as new rules safeguarding restaurant tips, are being pushed through via government-supported private members’ bills, measures to enforce holiday pay and regulate umbrella companies appear to be off the agenda for now.
Beels argues that new regulations are “always going to be behind the curve” of what is happening in the fast-moving labour market, as the lengthy process to get new legislation in place means it is often arrives to “address a problem from two years ago”.
While she says “I’ve always thought there needs to be a big stick in the corner”, she is not calling for greater legal powers: “It is about making better use of what we have got.” She adds: “The whole prosecution process takes so long. If you want justice for workers faster, then going down a prosecution route isn’t the best route.”
Beels has spent more than a decade working on behalf of the most marginalised workers in the UK. She was appointed chair of the Gangmasters Licensing Authority in July 2011, an organisation formed in 2005 after the Morecambe Bay tragedy in which 23 Chinese cockle pickers drowned.
She believes one solution is better education about legal rights for workers and employers alike, pointing to the examples of the Responsible Car Wash Scheme (RCWS) and in the Leicester garment industry, where change is being brought about through collaboration between workers’ rights organisations, community groups, unions, workers and employers.
Perhaps unsurprisingly for someone who helped Margaret Thatcher privatise the UK’s energy network earlier in her career, Beels doesn’t necessarily see greater union representation as the way to ensure better workers’ rights. “Unionisation can be a solution and helpful. But is not the only way,” she says.
She had backed a plan to bring together the UK’s modern slavery, minimum wage and agency worker watchdogs together into a single enforcement body that would help close up gaps in the system which rogue employers exploit. However, in December, Grant Shapps, the then business secretary, said the government had now shelved the plan, despite a promise in the 2019 election manifesto.
The single enforcement body was partly intended to help make it easier for exploited workers to know where to go for help – Beels admits that workers rarely approach her office directly, as “they probably haven’t the foggiest who we are”. Joining up the three regulatory bodies was also intended to enable the sharing of intelligence and resources and help close gaps in the system such as on holiday pay for vulnerable workers, regulating umbrella companies and enforcing transparency in supply chains.
“That I am disappointed [the single enforcement body has been ditched] is not a surprise to anybody,” says Beels.
That is not the only disappointment. It took the government more than a year to give Beels’s predecessor, Matthew Taylor, the green light on his first annual plan, and she is unable to publish her own plan, almost a year after writing it, due to bureaucratic holdups.
With less money than desired and a formal restructure off the cards for now, Beels is attempting to bring the bodies under her remit closer together more informally – encouraging their senior leadership to meet and share intelligence and best practice.
She would also like to see change accelerated, with the different categories of employment status – employee, “worker” and independent self-employed contractor – simplified to prevent abuse.
A “worker” – someone who is self-employed but whose work is tightly controlled by a company – is entitled to enhanced rights, including holiday pay and pensions, compared with independent contractors, but gaining access to those rights can be tough. Uber drivers, for example, had to take their case all the way to the supreme court over five years to claim their rights – with the company even then initially arguing that the ruling did not apply to all drivers in the UK.
Taylor called for changes to employment status in his Good Work Plan, published in 2016. The government’s response was that “it would be a good thing to make changes but now is not a good time,” says Beels. “Now is never going to be a good time – why don’t we do it?”
