Ten years ago this week, 23 men and women lost their lives searching for cockles in Morecambe Bay. Memories of the tragedy may have faded in the public mind. Work on Morecambe's cockle beds has ceased, and at the time action was promised to prevent such a tragedy happening again. Yet many of the underlying causes, and especially the role of gangmasters, remain unresolved.
Local fisherman Harold Benson is still traumatised by the events of 5 February 2004. He was called in by the coastguard to help with the rescue, but only got there in time to bring the workers' bodies out of the sea. "I've been on those sands man and boy … What happened that night was not only awful beyond words – it was absolutely avoidable … Even when the tide hit them, had they had anybody with them, like me, who knows the area, there was still a safe route off the cockle bed … They could have walked to safety."
Benson, like many local fishermen, believes it was the negligence not only of the gangmasters but also of the authorities that was responsible for the tragedy: "In the summer of 2003, I rescued 50 to 60 Chinese folk who were stranded while cockling for a gangmaster … That should have been a warning." The cockle permit scheme, under which holders have to complete a safety course and learn about intertidal fishing, was introduced in December 2003, just eight weeks before the disaster.
In the under-regulated world of the booming cockling trade, a local gang culture had been developing since the 1990s, evolving into a turf war. "The Chinese workers were caught up in it," said local fisherman Gary Cheetham. "I've seen them crying when the local gang set fire to their cockles … It was terrible. And there had been fierce cockle wars between local gangmasters from Scotland and Wales since eight years before … It was just chaos and it became very difficult to work in the trade."
Cheetham says the Gangmasters Licensing Act, passed in 2004 after the tragedy, hasn't changed things much. He believes the small gangmasters not following the rules may get caught, but the large ones are still out there.
And well beyond 2004 cockle pickers have had to be rescued. In October 2011, 17 cockle pickers of eastern European origin were saved at the River Ribble estuary in Lancashire, 30 miles from the scene of the disaster. These workers had no knowledge of the sea and hadn't been given any safety equipment or guidance by their gangmaster.
Gangmaster-controlled work is worth £1.34bn to the UK economy, but only 950 labour providers are licensed under the act. An industry source has informed me of numerous cases of gangmaster abuse over the past decade, from the hospitality industry to food processing and agriculture, saying that little has been done to change the situation. "There's the same number of unlicensed gangmasters as there is licensed, in the food-processing industry, for instance. And there are numerous licensed gangmasters who violate the rules and exploit the loopholes." Since 2006, 201 licences have been revoked, but this is "the tip of an iceberg", he says.
In the Channel 4 documentary Benefits Street, viewers saw a group of Romanian workers who were owed wages by their gangmaster, who also held their passports. The Gangmasters Licensing Authority is unsurprised. "The scenario of migrant workers being promised a better life by working for a gangmaster on farms in the UK but then finding they're paid far less then they've been promised – less than the minimum wage – isn't uncommon." So why are the authorities unable to prevent this kind of situation arising?
The GLA has had some success in dismantling crime rings in Cambridgeshire, Derby and Norfolk, yet the scale of the problem seems beyond its reach. It seems workers have little confidence in reporting abuse to the GLA: "They don't seem to do much with the intelligence," a source told me.
In 2013, only seven gangmasters were convicted for operating without a licence. Because of a lack of resources – its budget was cut by 17% between 2011 and 2014 – the GLA's ability to investigate and prosecute employers is limited.
Having already cut back its staff (only 37 investigators cover Britain), and with more job cuts expected, the GLA is struggling to carry on operating. In October 2013, it stopped monitoring some industries including forestry or apprenticeships and contract cleaning in the food industry –when it should be expanding to include sectors with the worst working conditions. Gang labour is common in the building trade, and poor health and safety under gangmasters has led to many injuries and, in some cases, deaths. According to the Health and Safety Executive, migrant builders account for 17% of deaths on building sites, though they comprise only 8% of Britain's 2.3 million construction workforce.
Activists are concerned about the impact of funding cuts on working conditions. Barbara Storey, chair of SOS Polonia, a Polish community organisation in Southampton, said: "Abuse in gang labour is still common in the industries where migrants find work." The media go wild, she says, about the inflow of migrants, but what they should be talking about is migrants' rights. Effective regulations would benefit both migrant and local workers.
It is not migrant workers per se but their exploitation that undermines local wages. As the GLA admits, the fines for exploitative employers have been too low to be a deterrent: if an employer makes an annual profit of £100,000 and pays a fine of £500 for breaking GLA rules, he may well carry on regardless.
Under this government's war on regulation and "red tape", migrant workers continue to be subjected to exploitation at work. If we're to learn the lessons of the Morecambe Bay tragedy, we need to invest in improving conditions. Instead of immigration vans, raids and endless spot checks, we need resources to be redirected into penalising exploitative employers and protecting workers.
