I was unemployed. I had no income whatsoever. I guy pulled up to me in a car, quite an expensive car. He said that as well as working, he’d give me somewhere to stay. He’d provide food for me. He’d try to make me as comfortable as possible and he’d pay me 50 pounds a day.
Then my boss decided to go up to the site that his family lives on and there everything went very quickly downhill. He stopped paying me anything at all. We were working up to 15 hours a day. And it’s very, very physical work, very, very heavy work.
There were a lot of broken looking people. There was no rest. Every waking minute of every day was spent working somehow. There were, I’d say around 20 other workers on the site who were working for other members of my boss’ family.
They were physically punished for the slightest little thing. They would beat them for not working fast enough. I’ve seen people attacked with work tools, with spades, with pick axes.
They have their heads shaved. They live 15 men in a horse box.
It was very much like a concentration camp. A lot of them were extremely hopeless. There were guys that had been there for five years or more who’d given up all hope. They couldn’t see any way to leave. They’d seen people try to run away in the past and always, every single time, a day later or two days later, they’d be dragged back.
By the time I was 24 years old, I have a decent education. I'm physically fit. How could this happen to me, sort of thing. It’s really, really difficult for people to understand that it could happen to anybody. It just requires somebody’s circumstances to change that things get worse for them that they’re able to kind of land in that situation. Absolutely anybody it could happen to.
As told to the European Commission
