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n the fenlands surrounding Boston, Lincolnshire, neatly-planted rows of cabbages and broccoli stretch out for miles. Scattered throughout the fields are migrants who have left eastern Europe to pick and stack for low wages and slim hopes of job progression. These workers fill the UK’s supermarket shelves, but their presence in the small market town — which has just over 64,000 residents — is putting pressure on public services, spurring local resentment. Boston, whose foreign-born population swelled by 470 per cent in the decade to 2011 according to the last census, has become a symbol of Britain’s ambivalent attitude towards migrant labour.

For David Cameron, UK prime minister, the influx of low-skilled workers lies at the heart of Britain’s battle against the EU . As the number of working migrants from fellow member states has topped 2m, Mr Cameron has pledged to renegotiate the rules allowing a free flow of EU citizens around the bloc, warning that failure to secure reform may trigger a UK exit from the union. The struggle to secure the border has intensified this summer, as thousands of migrants from Africa and the Middle East have congregated in the French port of Calais, desperately seeking entry to Britain.

The Conservative government argues that Britain’s generous welfare state is attracting benefit tourists from Europe and asylum seekers from further beyond. But recent research by Boston’s Latvian community has exposed growing abuse of migrant labourers, who are frequently paid less than the £6.21 agricultural minimum wage, charged high sums for transport to and from the fields, and may even be asked to surrender their passports to employers.

Kevin Hyland, a former police detective who was appointed last autumn as the UK’s first anti-slavery commissioner, outlines the scale of the problem. “Very often we talk about [exploitation] in the supply chain that’s happening in Bangladesh or in India or Pakistan where UK companies are buying from, but it’s actually happening here in the United Kingdom,” he says. “It’s extremely shocking.”

While there is a determination from politicians to stamp out cases of “modern day slavery”, austerity has sapped the funds available for labour regulation and wage enforcement. At the same time, large food retailers are increasing their demands on farmers, who require an evermore flexible workforce to accommodate British weather and capricious public appetite. Far from draining the public purse of tax credits or taking jobs from native workers, some migrants are being ruthlessly exploited by gangmasters, and enriching criminals who prey on their poor language skills and ignorance of local labour laws.

View from the ground

Ziedonis Barbaks, who arrived in Britain 16 years ago from Latvia, knows first hand the pitfalls of working in Boston’s fields. Both he and his wife, Vita, started out picking cabbages and tulips before progressing to construction and factory jobs. But such was the Latvian embassy’s concern about labour exploitation in the UK that it commissioned Mr Barbaks, known as Zee, to assess the scale of the problem.

Relaxing at Boston’s lawn bowls club — a bastion of old-world Englishness that doubles as a meeting point for the town’s Latvian community — Zee says he wanted to show the UK authorities what migrant labour looks like from the ground. “I hope now we are going to have some answers,” he says simply.

His report, now submitted to the UK government, was an attempt to enumerate for ministers and politicians the employment and human rights violations suffered by working migrants.

It found employment agencies limiting workers’ national insurance liabilities by hiring three migrants to cover one job, thus limiting each person’s working hours. Pickers and factory workers are usually compelled to use agency transport to and from the fields, and will be charged £5 to £8 only to discover they have not been hired to work that day. Those who complain to an employer about being injured at work or seek compensation say they have been dismissed. More than 200 Latvians who have lodged complaints with employment tribunals in the past two years over underpayment of wages say they have been blacklisted, and are unable to find a new job in the area.

There are allegations of more serious abuse too. One foreign worker at a food processing plant reported that her bosses threatened her with a knife and said they would “cut her veins”. She later complained to police, but her employer dismissed the incident as a joke. Several women have made accusations of sexual exploitation by bosses.

Zee believes that while these problems are not new — abuses proliferated after the expansion of the EU into eastern Europe in 2004 — the infringements have worsened over the past decade.

Mr Hyland agrees: “We’re becoming more aware of [abuse], so people are more able to identify it. But I think it is on the increase because there’s more demand for produce, there’s more demand for foods . . . and these are, historically, [areas of] low-paid employment.” He says the exploitation he has witnessed in food plants across Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire, West Yorkshire and the far north of Scotland is based on the same criminal abuse of vulnerable people that has led to the plight of north African migrants being trafficked across the Mediterranean.

While agricultural workers are predominantly from eastern Europe, and have full working rights as EU citizens, those who enter the UK illegally from further afield are even more susceptible to employment violations.

“There’s a big market of people in certain areas of the world where there is not any work or where there is pay that is extremely low . . . so there is a vulnerable community . . . and people are seeing that as a target for their criminality,” Mr Hyland says.

Responsibility for regulating labour providers involved in agriculture, horticulture and fisheries in the UK falls to the Gangmasters’ Licensing Authority, created in 2005. But local politicians are frustrated at what they believe is a lack of progress from the GLA in protecting migrant workers from exploitation.

The GLA has struggled to cope with cuts in its £4.3m national budget as demands for its services increase. Staff numbers dropped by more than a quarter under the last government, and the authority carried out just three prosecutions last year, a four-year low and a dramatic reduction from the 22 carried out in the previous 12 months. The number of investigations into illegal activity also fell to just 65, from a peak of 134 in 2011. Currently there are three criminal investigations ongoing in the Lincolnshire region and seven inspections into reports of non-compliance by licensed gangmasters. So far, there have been no prosecutions of employers in Boston or the immediate area.

Population growth

Paul Gleeson, leader of the Labour councillors on Boston Borough Council, says there has been a failure by both politicians and government agencies to realise the effect of rapid population growth on his medieval market town. In recent years, he has watched employment agencies lure more and more migrants to the area, only to charge them high sums for private rental accommodation and use the oversupply of labour to drive wages down.

“The GLA . . . have had their staff cut and their funding cut, so I don’t think enough is being done,” Mr Gleeson says. He explains that while Boston has always had transient workers, the emergence of food processing plants alongside farms means the work is no longer just seasonal. Instead of leaving after the summer, foreign labourers now stay all year. “That leads to the further exploitation of migrants, being taken advantage of with rents,” he says. “There’s this double profit being made from them.”

The GLA, which is waiting to hear whether it will be merged with other enforcement agencies, is not the only inspecting authority, but others are also overstretched. The government’s immigration advisers noted last year that on average, companies can expect a visit from HM Revenue & Customs inspectors once every 250 years and a prosecution once in a million years.

Farm owners reject the need for greater scrutiny and complain that they are already bearing the brunt of new political anxieties about labour abuse. Ever since the 2004 Morecambe Bay scandal, in which 23 Chinese migrants were drowned by a rising tide while picking cockles on the Lancashire coast, food producers feel they have been under the spotlight.

Produce World runs a farm just outside Boston supplying cabbages, sprouts, onions and potatoes to “blue-chip” customers. It says it takes its responsibilities to workers extremely seriously. About 55 per cent of its staff are migrants, and the Lincolnshire site employs about 800 pickers and packers, who start on the minimum wage.

David Frost, the company’s head of human resources, insists the company has tried to minimise its reliance on agency workers, but during peak season — when supermarket demand is high — an extra 20 per cent of the workforce is supplied from external recruitment. He says he is “fastidious” about only using GLA-licensed agencies, and employs an independent auditor to ensure compliance. When asked about the demands that supermarkets place on farms for large volumes of produce in tight timescales, he will only say that they have “very high standards themselves and reputations to manage and maintain”.

Mr Hyland, the anti-slavery commissioner, is far less sympathetic to the retailers. His strategy for cutting out abuse is to interrogate supermarket executives directly on the treatment of workers in their supply chains. He says although this may make for “difficult conversations”, he is focused on “making the companies aware that they’ve got to clean this up”. This will, he adds, lessen the burden on the police and enforcement agencies.

“Let’s default straight to the big companies in the supply chain and ask them to solve it and deal with it,” Mr Hyland suggests. “And then the police can deal with any criminal activity”.

Pressure points

Boston residents are more concerned that the oversupply of labour is exacerbating local tensions. Robin Hunter-Clarke stood in the general election as a parliamentary candidate for the anti-EU, anti-immigration UK Independence party and is a Lincolnshire county councillor. He argues that the arrival of low-skilled migrants has been “devastating” to the town’s economy.

“Migration has put huge pressure on local jobs, huge pressure on local services . . . there’s lots of people who want to get work on the land who can’t,” Mr Hunter-Clarke says. “There are lots of people who can’t get doctors’ appointments for example . . . all immigration has done in this town is it’s meant that people are working for less.”

Boston Borough Council acknowledges the additional pressure on local schools and health services caused by the influx of workers, but says they are often exaggerated. Its members also challenge the idea that migrants are taking jobs from local people, suggesting that actually it is the lack of permanent employment in agriculture that is the main barrier to Britons doing this work.

From the splendour of his embassy in London, Witold Sobków, Polish ambassador to the UK, agrees with this analysis. He insists it is a “myth” that Poles and other eastern Europeans displace Britons from their jobs. “We come here to the UK to work from morning until night, and to earn money, to save money, to send some money home,” he says. “When it comes to low-skilled [jobs] for people who do not speak fluent English . . . we really fill in gaps.”

Mr Sobków adds that he is besieged with requests from British businesses “begging” him to encourage more Poles to come over. And despite this demand, there is still a sense in some parts of the country that migrants are not welcome. “It may be a kind of fear that something has changed,” he says, “that we have a lot of people from different countries that have settled down.”

If the Polish ambassador is trying to argue his case in diplomatic circles, Zee is doing the same from the coalface. At the end of a long day on the building site he is back at the Boston bowls club, winding down with a game of Latvian billiards. “The local people and the government are only talking about how the eastern Europeans shouldn’t be here . . . that they take benefits . . . but I wanted to show them that actually it’s the gangmasters and the agencies that are the bad guys,” he says, lining up his next shot. “We just came here to work, to get a better life”.