THE GILLICK REPORT - PART SIX
Unsocial housing
According to the
Council's Index of Multiple Deprivation,
the average price of a Fenland home at the turn of the Millennium was £89,954. The ongoing demand for foreign
worker accommodation subsequently generated a growing market in 'buy-to-let'
properties, especially in Wisbech where these could be easily financed by
shoehorning high-rental migrants into them. This led to a general house price
inflation, so that by 2011 the average price had risen 59% and a Fenland home now cost £152,465.
Although this was still the lowest average price in
Cambridgeshire, it was nearly six times the average gross income
in Fenland.
Finding accommodation in Wisbech was made even more
difficult for local people when private landlords began refusing them tenancy
of any house, flat or bed-sit, preferring instead to have multiple foreign
tenants whom they could charge extortionate 'per-person' rents.
Wisbech had nothing like enough
properties to house the thousands of migrant workers. Not decently anyway. Soon
enough though, an unpleasant breed of gangmaster/landlord came crawling out of
the woodwork to take advantage of the situation, buying up all the available
housing stock and packing migrants into every nook and cranny. One had a portfolio of over 500 Wisbech properties.29 In
2007 there were at least 500 Houses
of Multiple Occupation (HMOs) in the
Town, but within six years the numbers had doubled, housing at least 7,000 East Europeans.30
Local people couldn't tolerate living
like this, let alone afford the rack-rents being charged. Nor should they be
expected to, even in extremis. After all, didn't we outlaw this kind of
'Rachmanism' back in the 1950s?
The whole nasty business was eventually
investigated in 2012 by Operation
Pheasant, a multi-agency task
force comprising Police and Fire services, HM Revenue & Customs, the
Gangmaster Licensing Authority, UK Border Agency, UK Human Trafficking Centre
and Fenland Council.
A year later, Operation Endeavour delved further into the racketeering activities
of gangmaster-landlords. Since then, an inspection of 490 properties has
unearthed 216 cases of illegal practices, eleven cases of human trafficking,
including five sham marriages, and 159 benefit offences. So far a total of 205
migrants have received help and rehousing by the Council and the Salvation
Army, while a total of 53 people have been voluntarily repatriated. These ongoing police operations were assisted
by a grant of £178,600 from the
government's Rogue Landlord Fund.30
Housing problems
Social housing
Renting or buying decent affordable homes in the private sector was soon well beyond the pockets of hard-pressed Fen families. More and more of them were therefore obliged to turn to the Council for social housing, almost half of the applicants coming from Wisbech.
In November 2007 Fenland
Council sold its stock of 3,779 social houses to Roddon Housing Association (Circle)
for between £2,000 and £3,700 each.
Although there were many other Associations offering such housing, Roddon
remained the main provider for the Council overall.
Between 2008-12 the Fenland waiting list for Roddon homes had increased from 1,802 to 3,033.
Meanwhile in 2010 the Government had
passed the Localism Act and the Equality Act, giving District Councils
greater flexibility in deciding who should be accepted on the housing list and
whom to prioritise.....irrespective of nationality. Three years later the
waiting list had reduced to 1,315,
with the proportion of foreign migrants being housed increasing substantially.
In 2010 there were 250 households
allocated to Roddon's Housing, of
which 31 (12.4%) were immigrants from
Latvia,
Lithuania, Poland and Slovakia. A further 54 East
Europeans were housed the following year. In 2012 the number was 42 (14.7%),
rising to 75 (22.1%) in 2013.31
In those four years alone a total of 202 migrant households were given
priority over local families. Sounds reasonable, does it?
Homeless
Between 2011-14 the Government poured £20
million into a Homelessness Transition Fund
to "protect vital frontline services". Cambridgeshire got £586,863 of it, of which Fenland
received £144,755 for its Eastern
European Nationals Homelessness Project.
The Ferry Project's emergency night
shelter in Wisbech received £274,000 from
the Fund. 41
13.
The lowest wages
Fenland is by far and away the
poorest area in Cambridgeshire. In 2011, when average gross weekly earnings
across the region were £500, they were 20%
lower in Fenland at £400.50.32
Back in August 1998, a 19 year-old
student working a 49-hour week in a Fenland food-processing factory was paid a
basic day rate of £4.33 per hour, plus time-and-a-half for eleven hours night
shift. After deducting £25.70 for his National Insurance, the student's
take-home pay was £282.50.33
The National Minimum Wage was introduced
the following year at £3.68 an hour for 16-17 year-olds, £4.88 for 18-20s, and
£6.08 for the over-21s. However, the chronic labour shortage at that time had
obliged Fenland businesses to pay far more than this bare minimum. During the
harvest months of the Millennium year for instance, 18 year-olds were earning a
basic rate of over £8 per hour in many Fenland factories, rising to £13 per
hour for the arduous night shifts.
Four years later, as thousands of East
European workers began pouring into Fenland, factory bosses immediately slashed wages by half, with no
differential for day and night shifts. Long-standing local workers, still on
the higher rates, were then given a bleak choice: take a pay cut, or go.
Those aged 18-21 were hit especially hard
by the Minimum Wage, having to do an adult's work for a sub-adult's pay, which in 2013 still only amounted to £4.98 an
hour.34
Gangmasters, or 'recruitment agents' as
the new breed now called themselves, quickly stepped in and took almost
complete control of the local labour market, deducting punitive fees from the
foreign workers for transport and a host of other spurious costs, while also
taking rental for the unspeakable 'multi-lets' they kept them in. A large and
permanent poster in the agencies' windows reminding migrants to 'Claim your TAX back here', was another
source of gangmaster income: charging a percentage fee for presenting their
worker's P60 tax rebate forms to the Inland Revenue.
In 2008 an adult Lithuanian was paid £5.52 an hour for a 40-hour week in a
Wisbech food factory. After deducting £23.20 Tax and £12.70 National Insurance,
his take-home pay was just £184.90. Like so many migrants, this particular
individual probably worked for part of the year, and then went back to his home
country for two or three weeks before returning to start work again, thus
allowing him to claim his tax back for the entire year.
Displaced altogether
Before long the Government had introduced the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme (SAWS), whereby local employers were able to import an entire foreign workforce for rock-bottom wages. In 2009 the saintly Co-op was given the go-ahead by Fenland Council to build 108 mobile homes and a communal centre on its farm at Coldham near March, to house 430 newly imported and minimally paid migrants.35 As it happened the scheme never actually went ahead, and by 2014 the Co-op's dire national finances led to the sale of all its farms businesses to the Wellcome Trust.
In 2013 Peter Kendall, president of the National Farmers' Union, told
sugar beet growers at the East of England
Show that farming had created 11,000 more jobs since 2009.36
Well maybe so, Mr Kendall, but since most
gangmaster/agencies operated an unofficial policy of hiring 'migrants only',
very few of those jobs went to Fenland folk. If a job-hunter wasn't East
European they were unlikely even to get on an agency's books. Or if they did,
they had to be bilingual since most of their fellow workers either couldn't, or
wouldn't, speak English.
Fenland Council's Migration Population Strategy stated the obvious in 2007 when it
observed:
'...The total labour market is
increasing, so is unemployment, and the rise in part time work has levelled
off. This may be a sign that, to some extent, migrant labour has replaced
local labour.
TO BE CONTINUED
