***The slaves in peril on the sea; They fly to Britain on the promise of employment, but Filipino seamen are being trapped, beaten and forced to work for nothing on British trawlers
Sutton harbour, Plymouth, 8am. The flutter of the trawlers’ flags provides a rhythmic accompaniment to the clamour of the dawn fish market. Up and down the jetty, captains bark at the deckhands to unload their catch faster: freshness and speed are key to turning a profit. On the pier awaiting the haul are the fish merchants, ready to deliver the catch to restaurants across the country, so they can be served up within 24 hours of being landed.
One of the boats tethered to the jetty is a scallop dredger, which has been dragging the fisherman’s equivalent of a plough along the seabed for the past two days, collecting highly-prized king scallops. The skipper has phoned the merchants from his boat in advance to negotiate a price: today, they are going for 40p each, but can sometimes fetch up to a ￡1.
The merchants typically add on 40% and sell the shellfish to high-end restaurants where chefs work their culinary alchemy for a colossal mark-up. The Ivy in London sources Brixham scallops from a Cornish merchant, and serves six of them in the half-shell with soft herbs, lemon and garlic, for ￡24. British scallops are sought after the world over: Hugo’s restaurant at Hong Kong’s Hyatt Regency Hotel sells the delicacy as part of its $1,090 (￡657) six-course seafood set menu. Yet there is an unpalatable side to this lucrative trade. We can reveal that a wide-scale police investigation is being conducted into the alleged systematic abuse of migrant fishermen on board Britain’s fishing boats, many of them deckhands on scallop trawlers.
Ten years after Britain was shamed by the deaths of 23 Chinese cockle pickers who drowned in Morecambe Bay, the exploitation of vulnerable migrants continues unabated. Lured from the Philippines by local “recruitment agencies” promising high wages, the seamen fly to this country expecting to earn enough money to transform their families’ lives. Instead, some British skippers are alleged to be forcing them to work 22-hour days for no pay, with little food, under the harshest of conditions. Any resistance is allegedly met with beatings and threats that they will be blacklisted from a career that represents their only means of supporting their loved ones.
A handful of victims have managed to escape with the help of fishermen’s welfare charities such as the Apostleship of the Sea and the Fishermen’s Mission, and have given evidence to the British police, before being flown back to their families in the Philippines. But many remain, living blighted lives at sea.
Shortly after the probe was launched in 2012, raids involving more than 150 officers were carried out up and down the English and Scottish coasts, and at least 50 suspected victims, mostly Filipinos, have been discovered, according to the Serious Organised Crime Agency. The policeman leading the investigation described that figure as “the tip of the iceberg”.
Police and border officials are now carrying out spot checks on fishing vessels. The investigation is still underway, and we cannot yet name the alleged perpetrators, to avoid jeopardising any future trial. However, it is understood that their scallops are widely distributed — although there is no suggestion they supply The Ivy or Hugo’s.
Restaurants serving scallops have had to contend with further controversy: environmental activists concerned about destruction of the seabed have launched an anti-dredging campaign. Some high-profile chefs, including Jamie Oliver, Gordon Ramsay, Heston Blumenthal and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, now use only diver-caught scallops. Currently, these make up less than 2% of the 53,000 tons of scallops landed by British fishermen a year.
The investigation into migrant slavery was triggered by the courageous actions of three women at a harbour in the south of England who cannot be named, where they rescued the first victims. They gave this account of their story.
One evening in the spring of 2012, Alice O’Hara, a 56-year-old port chaplain, strode down the jetty, her Hi-Vis jacket glowing in the darkness. She ran her eye along the rows of dimly lit boats tethered to the harbour wall before spying the vessel she had been searching for — a white scallop dredger. Days earlier, O’Hara had received a phone call from a seafarers’ trade union saying fishermen on board had reported being systematically abused and were pleading for help. Next to a group of British seamen puffing on cigarettes, four Asian men were sweating as they struggled with the backbreaking work of unloading bulging bags of shellfish.
O’Hara scanned for the captain. No sign. Unsure who made the call, she said in a low voice: “I’m here to help.” For a few seconds the men ignored her, but then one turned from his work and whispered: “Please help us.”
There was a shout and a long-haired, tattooed man bounded over and confronted O’Hara. It was the captain. “Who the hell are you?” He yelled. “You f****** well shouldn’t be here.” His fury escalated when O’Hara said she worked for a fishermen’s welfare charity.
With the captain’s back turned, the men abandoned their work and rushed to their cabin to grab their belongings. Then they jumped the 10ft drop to the pontoon and sprinted to hide behind a wheelie bin.
Roaring with anger, the skipper chased the Asian men and attacked them, raining punches into their chests. Seizing a suitcase, he hurled it towards the sea — it was left teetering on the jetty’s edge. He then turned and kicked another victim hard in the thigh. Paralysed with terror, the men offered no resistance.
O’Hara, shaking with fear, sprinted to shelter behind the door of a nearby fish factory and called the police. The rapidly approaching sirens meant it was now the captain’s turn to run. He was arrested, but, O’Hara later discovered, was never charged.
She drove the men to a hotel and prayed with them before inspecting their bruises. Then they rang their families in the Philippines, telling them of their escape and promising to be home soon. That night they refused to be separated, sleeping together in the same room.
The next day, O’Hara bought clothes for the man whose suitcase was hurled away by the captain. Finally, she took them to a Benedictine monastery where the monks provided them with free shelter. “They thought they were in heaven,” O’Hara recalled. “They were so thin and finally they were being fed. But they were terrified the captain would find them.”
One of the victims, Joshua, 35, told O’Hara his story. Before arriving in Britain three months previously, he had lived in Manila, the Philippine capital, with his wife, and their four children, all under the age of 15. In early 2012, his attention was caught by a local recruitment agency’s advert offering a 10-month contract to work on a container ship in Britain for ￡920 a month. With average income in the Philippines at ￡126 per month, it was highly attractive. The only hitch was he had to pay a ￡600 deposit and cover his own airfare of around ￡300. Unable to front up the money, he took out a ￡600 loan from the recruitment agency, figuring he would pay it off in just a few months. His family didn’t want him to go, but he insisted he had little choice if they were to remain above the breadline. So, after a sad farewell, he took the flight to Britain.
From the moment he landed at Heathrow, the promises turned to dust. Nobody met him, and after he finally got through to the British company on a payphone, he was instructed to take a bus to a city in England’s northeast. From there he was driven to a port where the captain informed him he was to be put straight to work on a scallop dredger. He was shocked — he had never worked as a fisherman before and had expected to be a container ship labourer. But if he wanted to support his family, the captain told him, he had no choice.
With three other Filipinos, he was ordered to fill at least 1,200 sacks with scallops a day. His only defence against the bitterly cold Atlantic squalls was a T-shirt, shorts and flip-flops and the only food was the daily Pot Noodle chucked to the men to share — the a British crew’s crude take on a Filipino’s diet.Given no life jackets, one of Joshua’s compatriots resorted to creating a makeshift version out of polystyrene. “If we’d fallen overboard we were goners, they’d never have recovered us,” Joshua told O’Hara.
The men were granted just two hours’ sleep a night and, with the beds filled by their overseers, it was invariably broken by the discomfort of the damp deck beneath their backs, or the fear of being kicked by a callous boot. The crew would ring a bell incessantly until the Filipinos emerged, exhausted.
Their lack of English meant the skipper’s verbal abuse had diminished impact, but it did not stop him ripping into them at the slightest opportunity. He threatened to throw them overboard if they failed to hit his unreachable targets. Violence became a frequent recourse. He punched and kicked them while they worked, and the cocaine he snorted on board only made his mood more erratic.
Back in port, the Filipinos were not allowed to leave the boat. This was the most painful blow for Joshua, as it prevented him checking whether his family were receiving his wage. He would later discover he had not been paid a penny. The men’s passports had also been seized, which dashed any hope of fleeing.
But as the months passed and their health deteriorated, the men felt compelled to act. While the boat was docked, one of the Filipinos took the risk of slipping off and phoning the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF), a trade union well known in the Philippines, begging them for help. It was the ITF who called O’Hara.
As O’Hara put Joshua on the bus back to Heathrow, he pressed a prayer he had written for her into her palm. “We will never forget you,” it concluded.
Meanwhile, word of the escape had begun to circulate. Two weeks later, O’Hara received a call from an engineer on another ship. “I’m coming off the vessel tomorrow morning when it’s still dark — about 5am,” the man said. This time, another support worker from the area, Josephine Farrell, 66, was on hand. She described how she drove down to the jetty in the small hours and parked her car in the shadows, switching off her headlights.
Through the gloom, the backlights of the ship allowed her to make out some movement on deck. As she crept down the pontoon, she saw two men having a heated argument on board. The engineer was trying to persuade another man to escape with him and when he saw Farrell, the angst on his face broke into a smile. “I thought you might come,” he said.Carrying a suitcase, he stepped onto the pier, looked back sadly at his friend who remained resolutely on board and then went with Farrell to the monastery. She was struck by his haunted appearance — stooped with dark shadows under his eyes and a sickly pallor to his skin. “He was so anxious that he had physically shrunk within himself,” she said. “He showed me a picture of his wife, they hadn’t been married very long, and she was beautiful.”
O’Hara and another support worker, Mary Pattinson, 74, now began to cross the harbour regularly, handing out sim cards and mobile phone top-ups to the migrant deckhands to help them contact their families. On one such visit, they came across men from Ghana and Cape Verde working alongside the Filipinos. They were hammering away at two rusting trawlers. As O’Hara, a former nurse, began to hand out the sim cards, she became concerned about the pained look on the face of a young Filipino man.
“Get lost,” the skipper interjected hustling her down the pier and lowering his face just centimetres from hers. “Why don’t you have a top-up as well?” Pattinson intervened. As the captain struggled to contain his fury, O’Hara turned back to the young man. “I have a terrible stomach ache, I’m in constant pain every day,” he told her, “I’ve told the captain but he won’t let me off the vessel.”
O’Hara demanded that the captain allow her to take the man to hospital, but he refused. Helpless, she made to leave but not before slipping the man her number. It took less than a week for the call to come, but a rescue attempt was now more problematic because the skipper was attempting to quell his staff’s exodus by instructing the British members of his crew to drive vehicles up and down the port at night to try to catch escapees in the act.
Fearful of the threats, the 23-year-old waited until the boat was moored just 50 metres from the charity’s office before hurdling the boat’s edge and running to the door. From there Pattinson drove him straight to A&E, where he was found to be suffering from sleep deprivation, chronic constipation and bleeding haemorrhoids. As he convalesced, he told O’Hara there were numerous victims still on the ships. Mostly, he said, they were those who had taken out loans of more than ￡500 to fund the recruitment agency’s deposit and their flight to Britain, and believed their families would be harmed if there was a break in their repayments. Pattinson received a call from another victim who relayed the captain’s threat: “If I ever see you try to escape, I will cut your heads off.”
Britain’s reliance on migrant fishermen has been growing for decades. Defeat in the Cod Wars in the 1970s when Iceland was ceded vast swathes of prime fishing waters and the introduction of EU quotas severely limiting catches have resulted in the amount of fish landed in Britain dropping from 874,000 tons in 1980 to 489,000 tons in 2012.
Dwindling pay and opportunities have made it hard for young men to justify the industry’s often brutal conditions and unsociable hours, leading to the number of Brits working as fishermen almost halving from 23,300 to 12,400 over the same period. Since the early 1990s, the UK fleet has sought to replace the exodus of domestic workers a with even cheaper foreign crew and inevitably they have turned to the Philippines, with its long history of producing able seamen.
Since then Indonesians, Ghanaians and, more recently, Lithuanians and Romanians have also been recruited. Most work on boats in the most challenging conditions off the east and west coasts of Scotland and Northern Ireland, though some are now being seen further south, as in the O’Hara case.
John Hermse, the secretary of the Scallop Association, which represents scallop fishermen across the UK, insists that Filipino crews employed by Britain’s fishing fleet are “well cared for” and have better contracted wages and conditions than British fishermen “who have a no-catch, no-wage scenario to contend with”. He said the police raids in December 2012 were an “isolated incident”.
Indeed, until now, little action has been taken — a state of affairs that Martin Foley, national director of the Apostleship of the Sea charity, says has been born out of fear among the victims of the consequences of speaking out, and the police failing to understand the complexity of the exploitation. “For years there has been abuse,” he says, “but now the authorities are finally becoming more attuned to its existence.”
The old attitude was illustrated perfectly when O’Hara paid a visit to the police station and was furious to discover that the captain who had beaten up the four Filipinos in front of her had not been charged. The police had deemed it appropriate to administer “restorative justice”, a technique used to avoid the court process and “bring together” victims and perpetrators to “find a positive way forward”. This obliged the captain to just say sorry, before being allowed to immediately return to work on the dredger. O’Hara issued a formal complaint, but the force’s subsequent review deemed the officers had acted properly.
In a letter to her, a detective superintendent conceded that the captain had admitted assaulting the men, but claimed the Filipinos had agreed on the jetty that night that no further action should be taken against him. He also said the men had talked of flying back to the Philippines the next day, so they would have been unable to testify. O’Hara says the men made no such agreement and stayed in Britain for weeks afterwards.
In late 2012, three more Filipinos escaped from another scallop dredger at a harbour in Scotland’s northwest, following tip-offs from Joshua’s colleagues in the south. That brought the issue to the attention of Police Scotland’s human trafficking squad, who took it seriously. Detective Chief Inspector Mark Hollis is leading the current investigation. “We’re working with police forces across the country to raise awareness of the problem, and increasing numbers of victims are now coming forward and asking for help. But the numbers so far recovered are only the tip of the iceberg,” he says.
In the Philippines, the case has also gained traction with the suspension of two recruitment agencies alleged to have worked with the British companies to dupe the men into signing contracts that hand all their rights over to the skippers.
Further efforts are being made to put an end to the blight of the fishermen slaves. The new Modern Slavery Bill is now being finalised by a parliamentary committee, so it is ready to be announced in the Queens’ Speech this summer. Frank Field, the Labour MP tasked with drafting it, will recommend that every fishing vessel weighing over 100 tons must be fitted with an International Maritime Organisation tracker that will make inspections of working conditions easier. The Apostleship of the Sea and The Fishermen’s Mission have also called for the bill to bring about increased checks that migrant fishermen’s contracts guarantee the minimum wage and comply with the law.
The Sunday Times asked restaurants and supermarkets across Britain to name their dredged-scallop suppliers and detail the checks they have carried out to ensure those firms are not exploiting their workers. Of the supermarkets that said they sold British dredged scallops, Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Morrisons and Waitrose refused to name their suppliers. Waitrose said their staff pay visits to the boats. Tesco declined to say whether any specific checks had been made. Sainsbury’s and Morrisons said audits were carried out by a third party. Asda failed to respond.
Of the restaurants, a spokesman for the celebrity chef Rick Stein, who has six establishments in Cornwall, declined to name their supplier or detail how they were caught.
Spokesmen for Marco Pierre White’s Marco Grill at Chelsea Football Club, and the Michelin-starred London seafood restaurants Angler and Outlaw’s failed to provide answers to our queries, despite all having scallops on their menus.
Hugo’s in Hong Kong declined to name its supplier, or whether it had made any welfare assessments. A chef at The Smokehouse, “the posh chippie” in Folkestone run by Mark Sargeant, the former head chef of Gordon Ramsay’s Michelin-starred restaurant at Claridge’s, was happy to name his supplier, but could not say whether welfare checks had been made. Caprice Holdings, which owns The Ivy and Le Caprice, also named its supplier, and said a member of staff had checked on the firm three months ago. Neither of the suppliers named are understood to be among the alleged perpetrators.
In Stranraer, a fishing town in Scotland’s southwest, the flags on the trawlers hang unusually limp. For a community so often buffeted by Atlantic squalls, the sunlight that bounces off the ripples lapping against the harbour wall represents welcome respite.
But the calm is a source of intense frustration for the police squad standing next to me. They are supposed to be conducting welfare checks on boats along a coastline where more than a dozen victims have been found in the last year. Just two days before this operation, two Ghanaians were freed. “Damn. The conditions are perfect, they’re all out fishing,” one officer growls. Not quite all. At the end of the jetty, a rust bucket of a fishing boat named Two Boys is moored. Two men are on board.
Detective Sergeant Robin Veitch, from Police Scotland’s human trafficking squad, climbs down the ladder on to the vessel. He informs the captain that foreign fishermen are alleged to be suffering systematic exploitation on this stretch of coastline, and asks him what he knows about it. In a rapid-fire Dumfriesshire dialect, the boiler-suited skipper says all his workers are local, but other boats, currently out at sea, use migrant deckhands on the cheap. “Don’t worry,” Veitch replies, “we’ll be back.”
For those families thousands of miles away, whose loved ones are still trapped on trawlers far out at sea, we hope he will be as good as his word.