31/03/2017 Inside Out South West

Hello, tonight yet more serious failings in our care homes.

We investigate the evidence of migrants

working illegally.

The foreign carers who can barely speak English

looking after some of the Southwest's most vulnerable people.

They mumble and then they get upset with me

and they say something in

their language, which I think is them swearing at me.

The fact that they couldn't speak English

frightened an awful lot of the residents,

including my husband.

Because he had trouble making people understand him at the best of times.

An apology from the migrant worker who didn't pay any tax.

As long as I was in England, I didn't pay any taxes.

And how do you feel about that?

Not good really.

And questions for the former care home owner

who took them on.

is it possible to speak to Patricia Juleff?

I'm Gemma Woodman and this is inside out Southwest.

Mid-morning in Saint Austell.

We are trying to find out the truth of the state of the

industry which cares for some of society's most honourable people.

Our investigations have brought us to this house.

We've been told that their's six care workers living there doing

shifts in nearby nursing homes and we'd really

like to speak to them.

The nursing homes in question were last year mired in scandal.

The BBC found shocking evidence of cruelty

in the home which at the time were run by

the Cornwall-based Morleigh Group.

In the outcry that followed, staff were sacked.

One of the six homes, Clinton house was shut.

And after a spate of damning inspections by

the regulator, owner Patricia Juleff's sold the firm.

Patricia Juleff may have given up the business, but she still

owns the house where some of the staff live.

We understand that all the people living in that house

migrants and some if not all were involved in a sham.

A sham that may be breaking both employment and

immigration laws.

And one which may have contributed to the poor care

experienced by some of the Morleigh Group's past residents.

I looked after him for nine and a half years

here, but then it got too much and I couldn't cope any more.

He actually went into Clinton house in May,

June, 2012.

Olivia Lewis was so worried about how her husband, Tony,

was being left after, she used to sleep on the floor

of his room in Clinton House.

I didn't trust her one bit.

The Morleigh homes used at their own bank of migrant workers to fill

gaps in the rotor and it was this group of carers that worried Olivia

most.

The worst part of all of it was the nurse that had been brought

in from Romania.

She actually gave my husband three times as much

warfarin is what he should have had.

Warfarin thins the blood.

Olivia says that over dose administered by

a Romanian nurse could have killed her husband.

It was one of several serious incidents that she witnessed

where migrant workers were confused because, she says,

of their limited English.

One nurse actually came into the country in the morning.

She'd got virtually no English.

And she was put on medication the same night.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not prejudiced.

Because they're foreign, good luck to them.

But the fact that they couldn't speak English

frightened an awful lot of the residents, including my.

including my husband.

Because he had trouble making people understand

him at the best of times.

They mumble and then they get upset with

me.

And they say something in their language, which I think

is them swearing at me.

Beryl Childsworth was also looked after by migrant

carers.

Some of whom she says had poor English and inadequate

training.

They were unsure, for example, how to empty her stoma bag,

her artificial bowel.

They'd come in and do it, but they'd get it all

over my pouch.

And they wouldn't clean it off or anything.

So I couldn't touch it because it was all

on my pouch.

It was further going on and Cheryl would come in and I would

be upset and I'd be in tears and I'd say, I haven't had a proper wash

this morning, Cheryl.

Those conversations with her daughter,

Cheryl, were becoming more frequent as Beryl became more miserable

in her ?650 a week room.

Lots of times, it made me feel very sad.

That I'd ended up there.

Because of the jobs that I did in my younger

days and I thought, oh, I've ended up here with this and they don't

give a damn if I'm dirty or clean, or the bedding's dirty or clean.

At the time, I thought I'm stuck here, I'm

never going to get out of this place.

Morleigh insists its foreign workers were trained to a high standard.

But we've evidence that when it came to recruiting them,

cost and convenience were more important to Morleigh than quality.

More important possibly than staying within the law.

It's January in Athens and we're undercover at a

jobs fair.

The event's been organised by an agency called Ucruitment.

Ana Maros got work at the Morleigh homes

through Ucruitment 18-months ago.

In that time, I was really happy to have a job in the UK.

Then I think we will all play by the rules, but, yeah, in the end,

no one did play by the rules.

In Athens, our job seeker is getting ready for an interview.

A conference room's been hired in one of the

city's hotels.

Our man joins a long queue of Eastern European is keen

Our man joins a long queue of Eastern European's keen

for care work in the UK.

When he finally makes it to the front, he

finds two women.

The one on the left is from a Greek agency.

The one on the right is English.

And is from Ucruitment.

Her name is Nicole and she's married to this man, Cyrus

Ali, who runs Ucruitment.

We found he goes by a number of other names,

too.

Including...

Back in 2012, the couple were banned from

being directors of limited companies after the insolvency service found

that they'd cheated migrant care workers out of hundreds of thousands

of pounds for training they promised, but never delivered.

But you don't need to be a company director to set up a recruitment

agency.

In Athens, Ucruitment quickly finds out that our researcher

has no care qualifications of professional experience.

But that's apparently no bar to working in a UK

care home.

Ucruitment says after these interviews, more checks on

experience and language skills are carried out.

Anna Maros arrived in Saint Austell with a nursing degree, but

she says many of her fellow Morleigh workers had no professional care

experience or qualifications and some had no English at all.

But that didn't stop Morleigh putting them in

its care homes.

I am ready feeling sorry about all the residents there

because even if they could speak and express themselves to us, we

couldn't understand them.

Even Anna struggled in the job because of what

she says was inadequate training on equipment she says

she'd never seen before.

In my country, we don't use that machine.

Hoists, to get people from bed.

We just do that in some other way.

So I didn't have that manual handling certificate, so,

yeah, they gave me quick training.

Like 15 minutes or half an hour.

Yeah, I was a little bit frightened.

Most worrying of all is our evidence that Anna should never have been

working there at all.

In Athens, our man's about to find out exactly

what's on offer.

It seems it's not a job up for grabs, but an opportunity

to work for himself.

Jacqueline McGuigan is one of the UK's top

employment lawyers.

She says there's strict rules around what is and what

isn't self-employment.

A genuine self-employed person has complete

control over their business.

They choose their hours, they choose when

to work, when not to work.

If there is any element of control and a

requirement to work for somebody else, then it starts to look

suspicious.

Our man is told his self-employment will involve working

for one care home company 45 hours a week under

the control of the owner.

Anna, too, was advised to go self-employed.

She set up a company.

Recruitment then contracted it to provide her services to Morleigh.

At first, Anna believed this arrangement was legitimate, but she

soon had misgivings.

I was asking for a payslip, I was asking when I

need to and how I will pay my taxes and things like that.

But I didn't get any helpful answers to my

questions.

Anna's contract said she had to arrange her own public

liability insurance.

Which she never did.

Anna said she tried to get advice on how to operate her

business from Morleigh owner Patricia Juleff.

I ask on the first day, to Patricia Juleff,

but she was sending us to our agency because we are not...

She didn't employ as she would say, so we would need to ask

questions to the agency.

Both Anna Maros and our undercover research are Croatian.

We know at least six Croatians have worked for Morleigh in the past year

and their nationality is significant.

Because Croatia is a new member of EU, its citizens

have restricted access to the UK labour market.

It means self-employment is pretty much the

only way they can work in the UK legally.

But it has got to be genuine self-employment.

Ucruitment says it was genuine self-employment

because recruits work for different care homes for two companies within

the same group.

But for Anna it felt anything but.

You couldn't choose when you would work or not.

They expected me to always be with my

phone.

And, yeah, any time they needed me to answer on the phone,

which was...

It wasn't nice.

It was really stressful.

We've seen hundreds of text messages sent by

care home owner Patricia Juleff to these apparently self-employed

service providers.

She tells them where to work and when to work and

in the case of the Croatians, she threatens they'll be sent back if

they displease her.

These texts also strongly suggest there was no chance

of Croatians choosing when not to work.

Even the roof over their heads at this Saint Austell house

apparently relied upon them toeing the line.

The migrants paid ?65 a week each for a room here, money

which was deducted every month straight from their wages.

If they lost their jobs, they risked losing

their homes, too.

I start to have problems when my phone is ringing.

I was like as a soldier standing up from bed and now that is all funny,

but at that time it wasn't at all.

For employment lawyer Jacqueline McGuigan,

it all adds up to one thing.

A self-employment sham.

With potentially serious consequences for

all involved.

These workers are not self-employed.

If they were genuinely self-employed, they simply

would not be working for one care home.

They would simply be running their own business and perhaps

having two or three care homes and deciding

what they would do day in

and day out.

They are providing a personal service to one care home

every day.

At the control of the care home owner.

To me, that is almost a no-brainer.

It is open and shut.

What is more, she says the sham makes the Croatians illegal

workers.

We are in the area of employment breaches and immigration breaches,

both together are very serious.

For those situations where the employer

knows that they are employing illegal workers, you could be sent

to jail for up to five years.

And face an unlimited fine.

Back in Athens, our man is getting tax

advice from Ucruitment.

Ucruitment says it didn't deliberately break

immigration law or deprive HMR see from revenue.

But Anna Maros couldn't get a national insurance

number and she didn't pay a penny in tax.

As long as I was in England, I didn't pay any taxes.

And how do you feel about that?

Oh, not good really.

Because I'm aware that each person who is working had to pay

taxes and, you know, as I'm paying my bills

taxes and, you know, as I'm paying my bills for phone

and my rent for house, I have to pay that tax.

But I just couldn't find a way that everything worked well and I just

didn't pay it.

It is not just migrant workers who may have

profited.

A self-employment arrangement means the employer may benefit too.

The care home owner could save tens and tens of

thousands of pounds saving on tax, National Insurance.

They are saving on holiday pay.

Sick pay.

Maternity pay.

Training.

So there is huge financial incentives for the

employer.

In Cornwall, we find some of Ucruitment's

care assistants still

renting rooms from Morleigh owner Patricia Juleff.

It's a different company, but it's the same agency is

not?

When the care homes changed hands, so did the workers.

Are you Croatian?

Do you mind me asking your nationality?

From Greece.

OK.

By this point, we alerted the new care home owners, a company

called Cornwallis to our findings.

They agreed the Croatians they'd inherited from

Morley had no rights to work and said they'd

halted their services.

This Croatian tells us he's done his final shift.

Employment laws and immigration laws...

Would you mind having a quick chat with me?

Morleigh owner Patricia Juleff told us she'd relied on Ucruitment to

check their right to work and live in the UK.

We went to her house to ask why she had placed them in the

nursing homes and hadn't herself checked their right to be here.

Hi, excuse me, it's Gemma Woodland from

BBC inside out.

Is it possible to speak to Patricia Juleff?

Is she in?

This man knew her, but wouldn't comment.

We just wanted to ask her if you questions

about illegal workers that

she was employing in her homes, care homes and until recently has been

housing.

Is it possible to have a word with her about any of that?

Could I ask who you are, please?

We also wanted to catch up with Ucruitment's Cyrus Ali.

He told us Ucruitment stopped advising the self-employment

route back in 2015.

But this record shows one of their Croatian recruits

set up a company only last year.

And remember what our Croatian research

was told just a few weeks ago?

We found Mr Ali in Suffolk.

Hi Mr Ali it s Jemma Woodman here from BBC Inside Out.

We just wanted to ask you a few questions,

why you ve been providing care homes with illegal workers.

We ve evidence that they re not actually working as self-employed.

Right.

They re only working for one care home, can you say that they re

working for multiple care homes?

They are indeed, yes.

Well we ve evidence that they re not.

So you were running an employment scam before and now we ve evidence

this is working as a sham.

Cheap labour at the expense of vulnerable people

living in care homes, how do you feel about that,

do you respect the industry that you re supplying workers for?

Of course we do and I think the allegations you re making

are very strong and one that my solicitor has been in touch

with yourselves about.

Some people don t have the proper liabilities public insurance

that they should have.

If they dropped a resident or something like that

happened, what would happen?

We think that you're putting people at risk.

Vulnerable elderly people in care homes who need respect and care

and quality of care.

I totally agree with you.

And what you re doing is supplying illegal workers.

I totally disagree with that.

You think you re working your way around the law

but you re not working around

the law, you re putting people in harm s way.

That is totally incorrect.

And once again I would like to reiterate

that my solicitor has been in touch and we ve asked the BBC on numerous

occasions to furnish us with the allegations they are making

because we have evidence to the contrary.

Thank you very much.

Thank you for speaking to us.

Thank you.

Later he admitted that four migrant workers had not had

the required insurance.

He said their contracts had been terminated and Ucruitment now only

had employees on its books.

He insisted that where migrants had worked as self-employed

it was entirely legitimate and he said Ucruitment s

top priority was to provide high quality, hardworking and reliable

staff to a sector short of suitable nurses and carers.

We also had questions for the regulator,

the Care Quality Commission or CQC.

Because its inspectors were told about the possibility of illegality

by one of the Croatians themselves.

This email to the CQC sent last September,

says there are 10 people in the house, Some of them

are illegals it says.

The CQC told us it had passed that information to the Home Office.

It told us it had found no evidence of immigration offences.

The local MP isn t impressed.

I ve been calling since last year,

with the revelations of the way the Morleigh Group were practicing,

for the CQC to have a review of their inspection and regulation

regime and for them to have more teeth more powers to be able

to intervene more quickly when there are concerns.

And with the revelations that this programme exposes I think we need

to include in that their duty to look at the employment

status and the was that the business is operating in terms of recruiting

and employing its staff.

Meanwhile it seems only one person feels any sense of responsibility.

I was just hoping that they don t bring any more

people in UK to work in this way ? how I did work ? and if they can t

find proper jobs for people they shouldn t mess

with somebody s life.

She s been very brave.

That's how I see her.

And we need more people like Anna to expose what s really going on.

For Beryl at least, things worked out well.

She went to live at home with her daughter

where she told us our findings were shocking.

Oh, I don't know what I'd think if I was in there now.

I feel sorry for them.

But then again they've got people in there that have got dementia

and they're not aware what s going on.

When I've paid tax all me life I don't believe in letting people

come into the country and go and work somewhere and don't pay

any dues of any sort.

Sadly, Beryl died this week, aged 82.

Meanwhile, business goes on for Patricia Juleff ? she's

applied to build 10 houses on the site of Clinton House.

To the anger of the wife of one of its former residents.

I hope the Juleffs don't get the planning permission to build

on Clinton and that they suffer the way they've made

other people suffer.

I'm not usually like that.

You wouldn't wish it on most people.

But I think they're absolute trash.

We told Cornwall Council, responsible for safeguarding

the residents, about our evidence.

They said the council has no legal duty to check the employment

rights of care staff.

Which begs the question: how many more foreign workers are caught up

in what may be sham arrangements putting them and the elderly people

they care for at risk?

And that's all for Inside Out tonight.

That is all from the series.

It all happened so quick.

We are taking a break over the summer,

but we will be back in the autumn, so I do hope you'll join me again.

Goodbye for now.