The kebab shop is on a scruffy and traffic-choked road in London‘s East End.
Its garish red exterior – reminiscent of thousands of other fast-food joints around the country – advertises cheap ‘meal deals’ alongside its halal credentials.
On the menu, helpfully illustrated with photographs, the offers at Al-Farooq Kebabish include one piece of fried chicken and fries for just £2.
Three chefs were behind the counter on one afternoon this week, tending the rotating doner meat and baking flatbreads.
No doubt the shop does a solid trade but, at first glance, it does not appear to be a business with international reach.
However, this unassuming little outlet on Leyton’s Lea Bridge Road has a surprising secret.
It is one of the Home Office‘s licensed sponsors of ‘skilled workers’ which, for payment of a £536 fee, bestows employers with trusted status and an ability to back foreign workers seeking to come to Britain.
Businesses which take up the role are warned that sponsorship is a ‘privilege, not a right’, and that they must observe a series of ‘duties and responsibilities’ to ensure that immigration laws are properly upheld.
Its garish red exterior – reminiscent of thousands of other fast-food joints around the country – advertises cheap ‘meal deals’ alongside its halal credentials. On the menu, the offers at Al-Farooq Kebabish include one piece of fried chicken and fries for just £2
Each application must still be considered by the Home Office, and carries a further fee, but for many Britons it will come as a surprise that the power to sponsor migrant workers is not reserved for blue-chip companies or even medium-sized firms.
More than 128,000 businesses populate the Home Office’s list, including many which do not appear to have great financial promise.
The most recent Companies House accounts for Al-Farooq Kebabish’s parent firm, for example, listed its wealth in ‘capital and reserves’ at a mere £897.
We can’t say how many migrant workers Al-Farooq Kebabish is sponsoring right now – it might be none – because the owners have so far failed to respond to our enquiries.
Data obtained under freedom of information by the Centre for Migration Control last month showed that some other kebab businesses had sponsored inexplicably large numbers of workers to come to this country.
The individual shops were not named, but one in Bradford sponsored 14 migrants and another in Birmingham backed 12. In all, 56 kebab businesses across the country had helped secure papers for foreign labour.
Do the migrants actually end up working in the jobs detailed in their paperwork? Follow-ups are few and far between, and there is evidence that the skilled worker visa is simply a means of getting into the country in the first place.
Last month, for example, an official report revealed Britain has witnessed a 100-fold increase in the number of foreign nationals arriving here as ‘skilled workers’ who then claimed to be refugees.
Asylum applications by these visa-holders jumped from just 53 in 2022 to 5,300 in just the first ten months of last year. And earlier this week the Home Office revealed that visa overstayers – across all the categories of foreign workers, students and visitors – now make up nearly 40 per cent of all asylum claimants.
Troubling questions around the issue of sponsorship are not confined to food outlets. Far from it.
The Home Office’s main skilled worker visa list includes ‘canine beauticians’, also known as dog groomers
The Home Office maintains a list of roles eligible for foreign applicants through the skilled worker visa. A separate list allows sectors experiencing particular recruitment shortages to pay such workers 20 per cent less than the normal threshold of £38,700 a year for a full-time employee.
Their minimum pay can be just £30,960 a year, which is about £6,500 below this country’s average salary. Care workers can be paid even less, at £29,000 a year.
The Home Office’s main skilled worker visa list includes market traders, ‘canine beauticians’ (also known as dog groomers), curtain fitters and, perhaps most bizarrely, ‘teachers of English as a secondary language’. So, the UK is importing workers to teach this country’s native language to foreign students. There are at least a dozen language colleges listed as sponsors.
‘It’s absolutely ludicrous that kebab shops are able to import workers under the pretence of being highly skilled,’ Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp tells me. ‘The Government needs to shut that down immediately.
‘It’s also utterly ridiculous to be bringing in foreign workers to teach the English language. This madness needs to end.’
Under the current system, foreign nationals can apply for a job on the skilled worker visa list if they can find a sponsor happy to confirm their labour is required.
Crucially, the employer is obliged to make only token efforts to seek applicants based in Britain for a role before they can look abroad.
In 2020, as they redesigned how work visas operate, the Conservatives scrapped the ‘resident labour market test’, which required employers to advertise vacancies on two approved platforms – in newspapers, online or in job centres, for example – for 28 days before being allowed to hire abroad.
Some Tories now admit this was one of several errors which contributed to net migration – the difference between the numbers of migrants coming to live here long-term and those emigrating – hitting a record 906,000 in the 12 months to June 2023.
Party leader Kemi Badenoch has admitted that when in government the Conservatives ‘got it wrong’. Yet by several key measures, a very unexpected sector is causing the greatest concern.
It is not the ubiquitous fast-food restaurants. It is not the crop-picking jobs which have a long history of low pay and poor conditions.
It is not even the hand car washes where slightly intimidating gangs of young men offer motorists a jet wash and a rub down with a soiled chamois for £10, ‘cash only’.
Instead, care homes are at the very top of the list when it comes to questionable recruitment practices and exploitation of workers.
Some have been out-and-out fraudulent in their approach when it comes to hiring overseas staff.
The Home Office’s independent Migration Advisory Committee (MAC), which helps guide policy, raised concerns at the end of 2023 after it uncovered ‘extremely concerning’ evidence of abuse of the care worker visa system.
A company which supposedly ran care homes sponsored 498 visas even though it had not provided any services for months, the committee said in a report, while 39 carers were listed as residing in a five-bedroom property.
Some applicants paid thousands of pounds for forged documents, and one was charged £21,000 by their sponsoring company for a visa, the MAC continued before adding, disturbingly, that ‘some of these migrants were then given children to traffic into the UK’.
The problem has not gone away. In its latest annual report published last month the Gangmasters & Labour Abuse Authority (GLAA), which is responsible for investigating allegations of illegal activities, described the care sector as an ’emerging threat’ where there has been ‘a notable increase in worker exploitation’.
In the 12 months to the end of March 2024 the GLAA launched a total of 133 investigations and, incredibly, 46 of those – just over a third – were ‘care-related’.
The surge is most likely a by-product of the huge numbers of foreign workers who have already been brought in to prop up the care sector.
Home Office data shows that 158,000 people were handed a ‘health and social care visa’ – a subset of the skilled worker visa route – in 2023, and a further 205,000 visas were given to members of their families so they could also come to the UK.
That annual total – a staggering 363,000 – fell last year to 123,000, mainly thanks to restrictions belatedly brought in by the previous government.
However, numbers in the rest of the skilled worker route actually went up by nearly 8,000 last year compared with 2023, hitting 132,700 including dependants. This was despite the Conservatives’ introduction of a higher salary threshold.
In some cases, at least, the Home Office takes action against transgressors. One prominent example concerned a company that operated 15 care homes across the North East – and led to legal action, which was finalised in the Court of Appeal last month and the Home Office’s revocation upheld.
Prestwick Care had held a sponsorship licence since 2008 but after a compliance visit from the Home Office in 2022 that licence was withdrawn. At the time, Prestwick employed 857 staff, of whom 219 were foreign nationals, which the company had sponsored.
The Home Office found evidence that seven workers were undertaking roles that did not match the job description or pay levels disclosed to the Home Office.
Prestwick’s published accounts boast that it won a ’20-bed two-year NHS contract’ for one of its homes which ended in July 2023.
So, in the topsy-turvy world of official contracts, a company that had been penalised by one arm of the Government for recruiting discrepancies continued to benefit from a deal with another part of the public sector.
What can be done about this constant reliance on overseas labour that is so open to abuse and is driving levels of massive net migration? MAC chairman Professor Brian Bell believes that only ‘substantial policy changes’ will lead to a significant fall.
Care-worker pay should increase by £1 an hour to encourage more UK-based applicants, he has said, because unless the job is made more attractive, ‘I have no idea where the workers to fill the vacancies are going to come from, if not from abroad’.
Additionally, MAC suggested in October 2023 that the list of jobs where there are shortages – known as the ‘immigration salary list’, which opens them up to cut-price migrants – should be cut from 60 roles to just eight. Today, it still lists 23. Professor Bell suggested that, instead of looking abroad for workers, businesses could do more to recruit people, including hiring foreign workers already here.
Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp points out that the Opposition has made a number of proposals to finally get a grip on the problem – including a definite cap on the number of migrants allowed into Britain each year.
But Conservative amendments to the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill, currently before Parliament, were rejected by Labour in March.
‘The numbers entering the country have been far too high,’ says Mr Philp. ‘That was why we tabled amendments to the borders Bill requiring a blanket £38,000 salary threshold and introducing a binding annual cap on migrants at a level to be voted upon by Parliament. It is shocking that Labour voted against these practical solutions. The era of mass migration has to come to an end.’
Labour’s answers seem more nebulous. Rather than limiting numbers who can come here, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has announced measures to encourage employers to hire from the pool of employees already here. Quangos will work together to boost training levels and ensure the jobless in Britain have skills required by employers, she suggests. It is a long shot, to say the least, and relies on the job market responding positively.
When companies have quick and easy ways to hire staff from abroad – including some at bargain rates – what is the incentive to do things the hard way?
Migration minister Seema Malhotra says the Government has ‘acted swiftly’ to ban employers who abuse the system from bringing in foreign workers.
‘In just over nine months we have driven forward a renewed crackdown, seeing over 600 illegal working arrests in January alone, and over 1,000 civil penalty notices served to businesses.
‘We’ve also surpassed our pledge to deliver the highest rate of removals since 2018.
‘We are under no illusions about the scale of the challenge we face, but this Government is restoring order to the immigration system.’
But without tough measures that actually limit numbers and properly skewer the issue – much like a kebab – the foreign workers will continue to arrive.
