The Employment Minister has sought to explain the Government’s efforts to tackle the issue of unscrupulous employers taking advantage of vulnerable, and frequently immigrant, workers in the UK.

Jim Fitzpatrick made his comments on BBC Radio 4’s ‘The World Tonight‘ after a BBC investigation followed a Lithuanian journalist posing as a migrant worker.

Mr Fitzpatrick said: “The Government has put in place a raft of legislation to protect workers against exploitation, whether they are indigenous UK workers or workers from accession countries or from other EU states…What we have heard is that there are clear breaches and what we are prepared to do is investigate those breaches.”

However, shortly afterwards, on Newsnight the chairman of the Gangmaster’s Licensing Authority, Paul Whitehouse, said: “This is the sort of thing we are out to stop. But if we are successful it will not stop the exploitation for the simple reason that the undercover journalist worked firstly on a farm and if we revoked the licence of that gangmaster, which we may do because we have got an inquiry running, he will carry on operating in the chemical industry or anywhere else entirely outside our remit.”

Mr Whitehouse explained: “Agriculture and food processing primarily, shellfishing was added on as a result of Morecambe Bay, everything else, which is about three quarters of the total cache of labour, is outside our remit.” He noted that if the Employment Minister was serious about tackling vulnerable employment ” he just has to give the Gangmasters Licensing Authority the remit to deal with gangmasters wherever they operate, and not just where we are restricted to at the moment.”

The TUC Commission on Vulnerable Employment will be investigating the extent of vulnerable exmployment and exploitation, and undertaking research to enable it to reach a considered view on the effectivness of current enforcement agencies, and whether government should be doing more to prevent the violation of employment rights.

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