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Article

12 Mar 2024

Author:
By Meri Åhlberg, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (UK)

Why Citizens Advice teamed up with TBIJ to investigate migrant care work

Citizens Advice is here for anyone who needs help, whether you’re in debt or have an issue with your employer, landlord or a product you’ve bought.

We help people find a way forward and, when we can’t, it’s usually due to a failure of policy, not the advice we provide.

Our joint investigation with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism shows migrant care workers are unable to complain about poor treatment or leave exploitative jobs because of the visa system. It reveals one of the most serious policy failures I’ve experienced…

I was looking through summaries of cases highlighted by our advisers and saw form after form stretching back to February of that year about migrant care workers who were destitute.

They hadn’t been paid, weren’t getting the hours they’d been promised, or the job they’d been hired for didn’t exist, leaving them unable to buy food or pay their rent and bills.

I flagged these cases to our director of policy and said we should make the data public. At the same time, our expert advice team, a group of legal and subject matter experts, also raised the alarm. They’d been contacted by several local Citizens Advice offices that were seeing migrant care workers who they were struggling to help…

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