He says he arrived from Indonesia this summer with a £5,000 debt to an unlicensed broker in Bali, delivering the documents to his family home as collateral. He only has a six-month visa for the collection period and fears that the work is not as lucrative as he had hoped. “Now I’m working hard just to pay back this money,” Banyu (not his real name) said in a video call from the caravan he shares with five other men. “Sometimes I get anxious. I can’t sleep sometimes. I have a family that needs my support to eat. And in the meantime, I’m thinking about debt.” The Clock House, which featured in a Marks & Spencer advert last autumn and operates under the slogan ‘Growing a better tomorrow’, employs around 1,200 people a season to pick raspberries, strawberries, plums, blackberries and apples. Brexit had already made it difficult to find options, a situation made worse by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Last year the majority of Clock House’s workers came from Ukraine, and the farm expected about 880 to return. After war broke out and the men were told not to leave Ukraine, Clock House went to an authorized British agency to find workers from Indonesia and Vietnam. The farm’s recruiter, Jane Packham, told BBC Radio 4’s Farming Today that when she tried to find British workers, 7,000 people got in touch, but only 100 actually started the job and “about one” dropped out. Packham said this was “probably no surprise”. “It’s a different kind of job, we’re not used to it – I couldn’t do it… You have to pay attention, you have to have speed and you have to be relentless.” In his first month, Banyu found it difficult to choose quickly enough. He was on a zero-hours contract, according to documents seen by the Guardian, which appeared to be against the rules of his seasonal work visa and he was not working the hours he had hoped. This was later changed to a minimum weekly contract of 20 hours, at an hourly rate of £10.10, after the Guardian approached the farm for comment. Banyu and his colleagues arrived at the farm through a complex chain of brokers and agencies. When Banyu lost a good job in Bali at the start of the pandemic, he was left digging tunnels for 12 hours a day for less than £45 a week. So when he heard about an organization that offered enrollment in an English language program in exchange for a job abroad, he jumped at the chance. The lessons were basic, but he was told the £550 course was necessary to match a job, even if candidates were already fluent. “The purpose of education is to pay,” Banyu said. “This course is really just for business, not for teaching.” If you couldn’t pay for the course, you could borrow the money, which many did. From there the debts to the broker grew. At first they were told their jobs could be in Australia, Canada or New Zealand. Banyu and his friends say that when they learned their jobs would be in Britain, they were flown to Jakarta to meet the UK licensed agent who would sign them up and get their visas. The Bali broker put them up for three nights in a basic guesthouse. One worker said they were charged around £1,000 for their time in Jakarta. All six men in Banyu’s caravan say they still owe money to the broker and know others on that farm and across the UK with similar debts. Once interest is added, documents seen by the Guardian show debts of between £4,400 and £5,000. While these debts include the cost of visas and flights – allowed under the seasonal worker visa – there are also thousands of pounds in charges for other services. Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you to the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online advertising and content sponsored by external parties. For more information, see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. In the three months Banyu was unemployed and enrolled in compulsory language courses as part of his wait to come to Britain, he was also charged. He borrowed £1,600 from cousins to support his family and buy food, bringing his total debt from looking for work in Britain to more than £6,100. While in Jakarta the workers met Douglas Amesz, the managing director of AG Recruitment, the licensed British agency commissioned to recruit them for the farm. AG worked with a Jakata recruitment agency, Al Zubara Manpower, to find hundreds of workers for British farms, including Clock House. Al Zubara appears to have used brokers on islands across the country to find willing farm workers as quickly as possible. The AG denies any wrongdoing and appears to have known nothing about the broker who had found the workers. Meeting in Jakarta, Amesz told Banyu and his friends not to pay extra fees and that this would be illegal, they said, but local brokers told them not to reveal what they had paid. “I don’t think Mr. Douglas really knows how Al Zubara was connected to other agencies like our agency,” Banyu said. Amesz said the AG is “fully cooperating” with the Gangmasters and Labor Abuse Authority and is “extremely concerned to learn of the allegations that have been made.” He said Al Zubara did not handle any recruitment and the AG did not ask them to subcontract recruitment to other local organizations or brokers. The AG said Indonesia’s labor ministry conducted an investigation and confirmed that Al Zubara acted legally. Now, in August, Banyu picks faster and works longer hours. The money he will be able to make from the job, after paying his installments to the broker in Bali, will be about £440 a month, he says. By English standards it’s unbearably low, but still more than double what he could make in Bali. When asked if he had considered confronting the Indonesian agent about the exorbitant charges, he said he had no authority to do so and would like to work overseas for them in the future. “I still thank God that I got a job here,” he said.
