 Good afternoon everybody and a particular welcome to Professor Katharine Bernhardt who's Professor of VU Law and Employment Law in Trinity College, Cambridge. My name is Dahio Kallig. I'm the chair of UK Group in the Institute and I'm really looking forward to this session today. Before I introduce Professor Bernhardt, I just want to remind you that she'd speak for about 20-25 minutes and then if you have questions you can use the Zoom platform to ask the questions and we have a question and answer which will go on until about 2.30. And just a quick reminder that today's presentation and Q&A are both on the record. I think we all know how important an issue of migration has become. It's become in some places politically very divisive as societies, particularly poorer societies try to absorb large numbers of migrants. Professor Bernhardt has made a special study of the result of migration in Great Yarnwood in Norfolk in the UK where large numbers of relatively poor migrants have arrived mostly from Eastern Europe over the last 20 years or so and have landed in a society which itself was declining rapidly. Great Yarnwood had been an important fishing port, it had been an important place for holidays and so on but from the second world war onwards it has declined and it was an area which had very large numbers of people who voted for Brexit. So I'm really looking forward to hearing Professor Bernhardt talk about migration in that area and about the effects which has on both the migrants and on the population. Professor Bernhardt, I give you the floor. Thank you very much indeed. It's a great honour and privilege to be here with you today. If I, your assistant is very kindly going to do the slides which are just coming up. And so you're absolutely right. I'm talking about Great Yarnwood which I imagine quite a lot of people in this audience have never heard of, let alone been to. Next slide please. This is Great Yarnwood on a good day, lovely big sandy beach traditional seaside resorts and quite a lot of British people have got some memories of riding donkeys along the seaside resort and indeed. Next slide please. He came to Great Yarnwood a couple of summers ago to do what's called his spraycation, and he produced this beautiful work of art on the side of one of the rather nondescript buildings in the suburbs of Great Yarnwood but it gives me huge amounts of pleasure. Each time I look at it. Next slide please. You can also see the residue of the great days of Great Yarnwood through some of these old buildings which were once concert halls now they've become crazy golf. Next slide please. Or they've become venues for slot machines and other things now they're on the sea front. Can you press next please. So just behind the sea front you what you see is a significantly declining town with very poor infrastructure. Next slide please. And as you can see declining buildings these buildings were once great buildings beautiful Victorian buildings if they've been in London, they'd be selling for millions but of course they're not because they're in a pretty poor state. So here, hopefully pointed out this town, which was already a town in significant decline. Actually has welcomed a very large population of low skilled low paid EU migrant workers probably about one in four in the town centre are EU migrant workers, primarily from Latvia, Lithuania, and recently Romania and Bulgaria, particularly Roma Romanians and Roma Bulgarians. And they've gone to work in big chicken factories Bernard Matthews for those of you who ever grew up in the UK you might remember the, the beautiful advert that Bernard Matthews used to run to encourage people to buy Bernard Matthews turkeys. And if they're not in the turkey industry, they're working in the fields in the round Norfolk. This one's a Sherrington farm up on the North Norfolk coast. Next slide please. I'll give you this by way of background just to tell you a little bit about the project that we have been doing for the best part the last five years. So for those of you who want to do your geography, Great Yarmouth is almost the most easterly point in the United Kingdom. It's remote, it's pretty inaccessible. The nearest motorway is said to be in Amsterdam, not in anywhere else in the United Kingdom. But what we've been doing is to look at the problems faced by EU migrant workers in Great Yarmouth. The problems they've been experiencing at work in their housing, and also in more generally in their general interaction with the local community. We've been working with a charity called gyros, which is a rather impressive charity, which has been helping EU migrant workers with their day to day problems. And in particular, the need that they had to apply for EU settled status. That's the right to continue living in the UK post Brexit. Every single EU national except the Irish needed to apply for settled status or pre settled status, and that was a precondition for them to be allowed to work. Next slide please. And what happens is, and next slide, they come on, they come to gyros, they get advice from gyros advisors who have come on the same migration journey as they have so working in chicken factories. And unusually they give advice in the native language of those who are seeking advice from them. And just to give you a flavor, next slide please, of the clients that come to gyros, what you can see, you can see the range of nationalities. You can also see just what low levels of English they've got, even if they've been in the UK for a long time, 70% of the clients rate their English as limited or very limited. Now that's not to say they're not multilingual often they speak three or four languages because they speak the language of the production line. And they learn very quickly, even difficult languages like Polish, if the line manager is Polish. But their English is very poor, which means they really struggle to interact with the sort of basics of British society, interacting with the utility companies, TV, licensing, council tax. They also struggle to do anything online and if you look at the numbers that how poor their IT skills are. So 85% say that their IT skills are three out of 10 at best. And this was a real problem when they applied for settled status because the settled status scheme was dependent on absolutely everyone having one of these. Trendy iPhone, which of course is very expensive. It was a scheme developed in London by young folk who assume everyone was like them spoke excellent English and had good IT skills, which as you can just see from this graph is absolutely not the case. Next slide please. The majority nationality is Lithuania, and indeed Portugal Portugal, one of the largest diaspora community Portuguese communities outside Portugal is in fact in Norfolk they've been in the UK quite a long time. You can also see Romanian as well Polish, and then you'll notice Guinea-Bissau. So what's also interesting in terms of the interactions with the local community is that there is a large non white population that arrived who had Portuguese passports and came to the UK as Portuguese nationals, even though often they've never actually lived in Portugal. Next slide please. We did meant we did a lot of work with gyros but my excellent research assistant lived in the ill named Buckingham House. Now that picture makes it look like some beautiful Edwardian villa. And on the outside, it was fine, but on the inside next slide please. It was anything but fine. This is the communal area, the communal kitchen. Next slide. It was meant it was part of it was absolutely a danger to live in. And yet the people who lived in that house thought it was a sanctuary, because the landlord, although it must be said was a racist he was absolutely opposed to anyone who was not white. He was very keen on having Eastern Europeans living in his house. Now this house is just off the street called St Peter's Road. And what you can see here on the left hand side you can see the local brothel. I think that studios, I think that was probably an overstatement of what goes on inside. And there are a large number of supermarkets on St Peter's Road, most of which are selling knock off cigarettes which is how they make their money. Next slide please. I told you a little bit about Great Yarmouth and the profile of the EU migrant workers living there. And as I said to you, we've been looking at their experiences both at work in terms of their accommodation and in terms of their access to healthcare. Okay, because my time is short I'm going to focus on just one aspect of that which is their experiences at work. And in summary, the answer is pretty terrible. Next slide. This is a picture from a focus group we did of people who've been working in chicken factories, and they all put their hands forward say their hands really suffered because working in the cold meant their hands suffered was swollen, were raw and red. And the constant themes that came out of it, just the very poor working conditions in a chicken factory which for obvious reasons have got to be cold. Next slide please. Another constant theme we heard repeatedly is the lack of training. People were literally dumped on a job and just told you get on with it. As you can see from this quote I won't read it through. But this was pretty typical of what people experienced it and they were not told how to do the job they weren't given any of the health and safety protection you would expect. And they are constantly told keeps coming out in our data, work faster, work faster. And some of them say that faster was the first English language word they ever, ever learned. Next slide please. Was over toilet breaks. They were regularly refused toilet breaks. And partly you can understand it because they were wearing PPE. And of course it would take time to take the PPE off and put it back on. Nevertheless, it was a constant complaint that they were not allowed to go to the Lou and if they did go to the Lou. That was it and they were told they'd be sacked if they actually did that. Next slide please. They had really long working days. A bus would come. This is the bus and pick them up and take them out to the chicken factories and they would do often 12 hours on the on the line. And then it would be an hour and a half each way with the bus to take them to and fro. And the other thing we heard repeatedly was just how tired people were. And for that reason when they were at home all they want to do was just slump in front of the television. And the idea that they should do sort of virtuous interaction with the local community was absolutely for the birds. Next slide please. Now what's really interesting to us is the dissonance between what we were told about in the focus groups. And in fact what they came to Jairos for help about. And as you can see from this graph. A lot of them came to Jairos for help with support to engage with their employer, often for translating contracts or translating health and safety guidance. You can see some very practical things like not being given pay slips or not being paid a salary. What you do not see there is the issue that came out a lot in the focus groups, which was how they suffered from racial and sexual harassment in the workplace. And dissonance between what they actually came to complain about and what they actually reported to us what was going on. Next slide please. So what we saw in the Jairos data was that the people weren't being paid the right amount of money they weren't being paid their salary, or indeed holiday pay. It's a common practice for employers not to pay the right amount of holiday pay because that was often the profit margin on a job. Not being given pay slips. And because they weren't given pay slips that created problems down the line because it meant that when they were applying for EU SS that's the post Brexit status. They couldn't show how long they had actually been in the UK for and that affected whether they got settled status the higher level or only pre settled status the lower level. Lots came as you saw for support for just dealing with employers about English language issues so translation issues. Next slide please. And to you. There is this constant issue about non payment of holiday pay here. This is not to give you some sort of context here we go. Client work for a particular company left three months ago he got his P 45 the piece of paper you need when you leave your work but he didn't get any of his holiday pay. What's interesting is what do you do about it. So in this case, the gyros worker contacted the head office and repeatedly contacted the company until eventually they did in fact pay up. Next. Next. Side please. The other issue that we see in the data is that a lot of these people employed on zero hours contracts and zero hours contracts mean that they are very dependent on the line manager to actually offer the work. What you see is the the migrant workers reporting they basically have to bribe the line manager in order to make sure they get the hours so that they can earn enough to live on. And so you can see in this case, the line manager took 20 quid from them. And it was worth their while because they had the opportunity of earning 200 quid by getting the hours they wanted. Next slide please. These problems, none in and of themselves catastrophic, but nevertheless grim lead to what's called problem clustering. And this is not rocket science but as you can imagine if you are not being employed on a zero hours contracts there's no work for you. That clearly affects your ability to pay for your rent. It will take some time to claim welfare benefits so you get into debt and therefore life spirals downwards. And what I can elaborate on this elsewhere I think it takes little imagination to see why people get into such trouble very quickly when they're on low paid work and certainly with no savings. And so this comes to the question that I want to think about which is what happens when enforcement doesn't happen. Next slide please. So to summarize what I've been saying. The most common problems that we've seen in the gyros database, people on zero hours contracts getting very little pay, not getting toilet breaks, and other issues which has long term impacts on their health. Now just for your major the drawings on the left are drawings by one of the gyros workers who drew from her own memory what she was experiencing when she was not working for gyros but was working in chicken factories. Now we originally tried to put some a request into AI to see if they could draw come up some pictures of chicken factories, and the pictures came back of chickens running around like mad things on the chicken on the factory floor which of course is not the case because they're working throughout with dead chickens and these are said dead chickens. Next slide please. Now you might be thinking well look, you know this is pretty bad and presumably UK employment law covers all of this stuff. And so why is it that this is not being dealt with. Well, next slide please. Under the law. As you know, article 71 of what's now the workers regulation 492 11 says a migrant worker must not be treated any differently from national workers in respect of conditions employment. As regards remuneration dismissal reinstatement or re employment. So this requires equal treatment, and it's to be fair to the UK there is absolutely equal treatment, all of these rights will apply equally to EU nationals as they do to UK nationals. So, at the formal level, there's absolutely no doubt there is equal treatment. Next slide please. The more in the EU enforcement directive, it's quite clear that member states have got to ensure judicial procedures for the enforcement of obligations under article 45 that's the provision on free movement of workers, and under the workers regulations and they've got to be available to all union workers and members of their family. Also the case in UK, it does indeed allow for EU migrant workers to enforce their rights before employment tribunals that's the base level tribunal, which migrant workers can go to and UK workers can go to. And indeed, some migrant workers do actually get to employment tribunals. Next slide please. And again. And again. And one more time. Now, this is national data about EU migrant workers bringing claims before employment tribunes. Now the data is not robust for the simple reason that when we first did the exercise back in 2010 2012. We go through every single paper copy of employment tribunal decisions are about 150,000 a year to try and work out whether they've been brought by migrant workers. And we use various yardsticks to test that, but we fully admit the data is not robust but as you can see, there we reckon there were about 238 cases brought by EU migrant workers over a period of three years, which would count as approximately 071% of all cases brought in that period. Now that indicates a significant number of significant under enforcement of employment rights. We repeated the exercise for 2019 to 2022. This is slightly more reliable, because the other decisions are now online. So it didn't require physical manual searching of every case. And it looks like the number of cases have gone up slightly and there's a slightly higher level of enforcement. Next slide please. When you dig into the cases, keep clicking please. What you see in those cases is actually a remarkable similarity to what we saw on the ground in Great Yarmouth refusal of toilet break people being shouted at bribery to get better shifts. Next slide please and all three that there was harassment going on so people were allocated by nationality to particular factory lines. We saw people getting abused in the post Brexit world a certain amount of race discrimination, and also, in one case, an employer insisting that workers speak English. Next slide please click twice. And what you see then is the problem clustering that I referred to before, that people lose their jobs quickly become homeless, the very poor quality of the housing that migrant workers are living in. HMO stands for home of multiple occupation. Remember the one I showed you that they ill named Buckingham house where my research assistant live for a period of time. This is exactly what we saw in Yarmouth. And then as you can see problem cost clustering and problem cascading. If you haven't if you get sick, you lose your job, you become homeless. And then you may be denied benefits because you haven't been in the UK for long enough. And then that affects your health. Now all of this paints a pretty bleak picture. The only slightly positive thing that I can report from these employment tribunal cases and remember they're right across the country. And none of them come from Great Yarmouth is that for individuals who do manage to get to an employment tribunal. Next slide please. Actually they're treated extremely well and leniently by the tribunal chair. So they're given longer to apply for case to, if they're out of time they're given longer to apply. We've even found cases where the judge had sat down next to the migrant worker with a stapler to try and sort out paperwork and make sure that they had their papers in something of an order. So, in fact, when they got to tribunals, they had a much higher success rate than nationals, which tends to suggest that only the most worthy and most determined get to tribunals. So the question is, if our data is broadly right that there is very low levels of enforcement before tribunals, even if once they get to tribunals they are treated well, that raises the question, why are migrant workers not enforcing their rights. Partly it's about culture. Partly it's about, well, why in my own country, I don't want to engage with the state because historically engaging with the state of Eastern Europe has not been a good experience. Partly it's because they don't have the language. They certainly don't have the legal advice. It does seem that the longer you're resident in the UK, the more likely you are to bring a case. But as you've seen, the number of cases that have been brought are very small. You might think, well, why does it matter that if they don't enforce their rights? Well, the answer is, I think, twofold, one, rule of law, that if there are these rights they should be enforced and it's important for the dignity and the safety of the individuals. But there's also an economic reason that good employers are ensuring that people have their rights protected. And of course they're being undercut by these, it must be said, around Great Yarmouth predominantly poor employers who are not actually giving people their rights. And of course individuals aren't enforcing their rights. And you see that very clearly in Great Yarmouth. Next slide please. So, in our data, and we looked at nearly 7000 case notes, we did not see a single reference to employment tribunals. Not a single case was, but it was being a single client was being referred to an employment tribunal. And of those nearly 7000 case notes, there were only two mentions made to ACAS, the advisory conciliation and arbitration service. And as one gyros observer, rightly advised, rightly observed in all my years at gyros, I've only had three people who made complaints to tribunals, but a lot who made complaints to me, people just don't follow through. Which means that of course, employers get away with it. Next slide please. But where gyros does play an important role is in their pragmatic approach to trying to deal with problems. And I've already mentioned some of that to you, but I'll give you a couple of further examples. In this case, it's a client who didn't get their P45, which marks the end of their employment. And as you can see what the gyros advisor did, I called the main office to speak to the agency directly. And the administrator informed me that the client is still employed and he still has outstanding holiday play. The client didn't know he was still employed as he hasn't been called for any shifts. Said he would then try to get some work with them. If he not, he will come back if he needs to in order to request P45. So basically it's getting on to the phone to the relevant people and actually trying to sort things out for the client. Next slide please. In this case, gyros actually helps the individual into a new job, right, helping him write a CV. And in fact, gyros keeps their CVs on file, which is important if they're actually applying for welfare benefits. And as you can see in this case, not only did they help him into work, but also to apply for universal credit, which is now the principal welfare benefit. Next slide please. What you see coming out of gyros is although they're not telling people to use formal legal routes to enforce their rights. What you see is gyros adopting a rather pragmatic, resolution focused approach. And what we also see is that gyros play a number of roles. There might be an advocate for their client, not in the way a lawyer would be, but to try and make the case to an employer that the individual needs holiday pay or P45. They give them money if they need to get a bus to go to a job interview. They act as advisor for the reasons we've seen. They've acted as translator. They also offer one stop shop support. And it's quite common that individuals come in with a polythene bag full of letters, most of which have been unopened. And then gyros slowly picks apart all of their problems and tries to help prioritize the things that need to be sorted out immediately and those that can wait, and then tries to sort out all that they do. Interesting and particularly interesting for lawyers and particularly someone like me who spent my entire working life talking to students about bringing claims is that the clients like this much more holistic, pragmatic approach. Next slide please. You can see here the appreciation rates are off the scale I mean if we as academics got these sorts of approval ratings in our questionnaires we'd be thinking we were doing an absolutely fantastic job. But maybe because gyros clients are pragmatic to and they know that they couldn't afford to go to lawyers and so this is the best that they can get, but it is striking the level of support and the level of enthusiasm for what gyros does. Next slide please. So this is what we call pragmatic law we call it pragmatic law because it's done by frontline advice organizations against the back cloth of law, albeit with no reference to law or to legal roots to enforcement. And the pros are of course it's cheap, it's effective in the often resolves problems that the clients have got and as you've seen the clients like it. And of course, serious disadvantages that the gyros often misses key legal points they don't bring cases for harassment victimization bullying racial discrimination. Of course because they are dealt with on a case by case basis, nothing changes. And so in fact this is what goes back to my question what happens when enforcement doesn't happen, unless gyros or their equivalents elsewhere in the country gets involved. There is zero enforcement. Last slide please. So this has whetted your appetite. This is the book which we've been working on for years and years trying to pull together our research and you might recognize the picture on the front cover is indeed of Buckingham House the picture I showed you the front covers was written by one of the gyros workers, and what's incredibly realistic about the drawing is both the bins being lined up outside, and the fact that the migrant workers are standing outside having a smoke. Thank you very much indeed.