GLA strips licence from underpaying recruiter

The Gangmasters Licensing Authority (GLA) has revoked the licence of a Dudley gangmaster found to be paying less than minimum wage and lacking “competencies required to run the business compliantly”.
Wed, 4 Feb 2015
The Gangmasters Licensing Authority (GLA) has revoked the licence of a Dudley gangmaster found to be paying less than minimum wage and lacking “competencies required to run the business compliantly”.

The GLA initially moved to revoke the licence of A N Recruitment in May last year but the company’s managing director and principal authority as named on its GLA licence, Sahra Rizwan, made a court appeal.

That appeal was considered by industrial tribunals Judge Victoria Dean who released a decision late last week in favour of the GLA, thereby triggering the licence revocation.

A GLA statement released today [4 February] says the company was not paying some pea and sprout pickers the National Minimum Wage and Rizwan “lacked the competencies required to run the business compliantly”.

In the statement, GLA chief executive Paul Broadbent said: “Our findings suggested we had uncovered a case of someone being put up merely to act as ‘a front’ for a business – and the appeal judge fully backed our assessment.”

He continued to say that while the company was run and licensed in Rizwan’s name, she had little control over the day-to-day running of it, primarily because she was working for an accounting firm three days a week.

“She lacked much of the basic knowledge we would expect a managing director to know about her company’s operations – like the hourly rates her business charged to provide field workers to a farm.”

The company, in addition to failing the competency test and underpaying employees, was not paying holiday pay; did not carry out sufficient risk assessments; did not provide necessary protective equipment; and provided training documents in English only, which most staff could not read.

In her written decision, Judge Dean said: “The appellant’s failures, particularly in relation to the critical standards, are a serious dereliction of duty and to allow her simply to rectify those matters would undermine entirely the ethos of the legislation. The decision of the GLA shall stand.”

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