The system is made far worse because of extensive corruption and brutal exploitation among many of the employing companies. Charging large fees for arranging the sponsorship visa is commonplace; we have heard of rates between £12,000 and £28,000 being asked, many times the official fee of £304 per person.
Many of the sponsoring companies are no more than employment agencies providing temporary and occasional cover staff to care homes, or bad employers offering “gig economy” work in the poorly regulated home care industries. We know of agencies that offer shifts to students and migrants with no legal right to work on a cash in hand basis at rates below the minimum wage.
Some of these companies lack secure long term contracts with local authorities, meaning they fail to offer full time work to their employees. In the worst cases they provide false monthly pay slips to show HMRC and the Home Office that full time hours have been worked, and make deductions for tax and National insurance at commensurate rates. There are sometimes further deductions for uniforms, transport costs, and to repay loans.
Precious fell victim to one of the worst of these companies. Her pay slip always showed she had worked 40 hours a week for a gross monthly salary of £2000. Most weeks she was offered no more than a couple of shifts via a second company, at unsocial hours, in another town nearly 20 miles away, requiring a long bus, or expensive taxi journey.
Several times, she and colleagues were (illegally) offered alternative work packing frozen food in a warehouse. Whatever she actually earned, and after her accident it was nothing, the employer demanded payment of the income tax and NI contribution based on her false payslip.
Eventually HMRC became suspicious and sent a team of investigators to interview the employer and some of the workers. They were blackmailed into telling lies to match the employer’s story, because of their vulnerability and fear. The terms of the sponsorship visa state that if they cease to work for the original employer they have only 60 days to find an alternative sponsor, after which their visa is revoked and they become liable to removal from the UK.