- WHISTLE-BLOWERS HAVE COME FORWARD TO CLAIM THAT BETWEEN 2009 – 2014, RICHARD TAYLOR RAN A REHAB PROGRAMME THAT USED RECOVERING DRUG USERS TO WORK UP TO 6 DAYS A WEEK WITHOUT PAY
- PARTICIPANTS WERE SUPPOSED TO BE ON EDUCATIONAL REHAB EARNING QUALIFICATIONS, BUT INSTEAD WERE DECLARED ‘UNFIT-FOR-WORK’ AND MADE TO HAND BENEFITS OVER TO VICTORY OUTREACH UK WHILST UNDERGOING HARD MANUAL LABOUR
- WORKERS WERE ON SITE FOR BETWEEN 8-10 HOURS A DAY WITHOUT PROPER SAFETY EQUIPMENT
By Mark S Redfern @genericredfern December 2019
A leading Brexit Party candidate in Wales subjected recovering drug-users to what they describe as a form of “slave labour” in order to build a new church premises and work on his own private residence for no pay and without proper safety equipment.
Multiple sources have spoken to voice.wales accusing Taylor of using a rehabilitation programme for recovering drug-users in order to exploit it’s vulnerable participants. Taylor took over the programme in 2009 and stripped down the educational element and instead made participants work up to 6 days a week of manual labour without pay.
When recovering drug users or ex offenders joined the programme, they were declared unfit for work and made to claim Housing Benefit and Employment Support Allowance (ESA). One source says he was made to hand over half of his ESA (£130) every fortnight to the rehabilitation programme, headed by Taylor, as rent for living on site and rehab services. This is in spite of the fact that all of his housing benefit was paid to the organisation as well.
20-30 workers were used to renovate a warehouse that later became an Evangelical Church. They regularly worked without proper safety equipment and were fed what they describe as substandard food. Often their only day off was Sunday, when they were told to attend worship and act as ushers to the congregation.
Richard Taylor, who is running as a Brexit Party parliamentary candidate for Blaenau Gwent, was a director of Victory Outreach UK (VOUK) during 2009-2014, a group of rehabilitation facilities which later branched out to form the American-style evangelical Victory Church in Cwmbran, where he served as a pastor.
Three whistle-blowers comprising of two ex-residents and a local tradesman, have spoken to voice.wales to accuse Taylor of abusing his position to force residents to work tough, manual labour for him, some of which was completely unpaid. According to our sources, when some residents refused to work without compensation they were threatened with eviction by Taylor and his staff.
Ross Grant, 30, joined the VOUK site in Abertillery after he left prison. The two had first met whilst Taylor had been preaching to prisoners across the UK to promote his rehab facility to those who were soon to be released. After arriving in October 2009, Ross soon became a voluntary member of staff until he left in 2013.
Lee Davies, 41, was living in the same facility at the time. He came to the centre in 1998 before leaving in 2011. Lee was one of the few paid members of staff but he drew a salary of just £380 a month, and had to be on duty 7-days a week. Out of this £380, he was also required to pay rent to VOUK for living on site. Prior to Taylor’s tenure, Davies says he was paid more than £380 a month.
Grant says he had first-hand experience of the “slave labour” treatment of recovering drug-users under Taylor’s leadership, while Davies was witness to the extreme exploitation whilst himself being paid less than the minimum wage.
Their testimony has been corroborated by another source close to Richard Taylor and VOUK, who as a Tradesman would often visit the work-site to witness the exploitation first hand.
After arriving at the facility, residents were said to have been promptly declared Unfit-for-Work by the Department for Work and Pensions. “Everyone was on ESA and housing support allowance,” Grant told voice.wales. In addition to the housing payments coming directly from the government, Ross Grant claims he was paying Victory Outreach UK more than half of his ESA payments every fortnight.
For the 4 years Grant lived at the Bush Hotel facility in Abertillery- ran by VOUK -his housing benefit was paid directly to the programme, but he told us he was forced to pay “rehab services” on top of that. “I used to get £240 every fortnight [ESA]… I’d pay £130 out of that which would leave me with £110.”
Despite paying the programme this money, the provided meals were “worse than prison food,” Grant told us. What they were served, according to the ex-resident, was coming straight from the church donation box: “We had a kebab night every Friday. I usually ended up getting two wraps just because it was one of the few decent meals.”
As part of the rehabilitation programme there was a mandatory work scheme, sometimes included in therapy programmes to keep the mind occupied during recovery and to learn transferable skills whilst fighting addiction.
But Ross says that Taylor saw this work programme as free labour to expand his church and then to make improvements on his own private residence.
In Summer 2011, Ross and his fellow residents were used to renovate an old warehouse into the Victory Church that stands in Cwmbran today, despite being ruled Unfit-for-Work by DWP. The job took two years to complete and Taylor oversaw the work. “He was present every-other day,” Grant said. “He had his own office upstairs.”
Lee Davies told us Taylor would collect the managers together to “tell them what needed doing and then swanee off.”
According to Ross Grant you can still see his handiwork on the Cwmbran church building. “I built the manhole that’s out there and the pipework that’s there, it’s still standing today.”
Lee Davies says there were 20-30 workers who laboured renovating a warehouse into what would become Victory Church. “We used to have a 17-seater minibus and I had my own vehicle,” he told us. The remainder walked up from another local rehabilitation facility under the same VOUK banner.
All three sources say participants were often forced to work 8-10 hours a day, six days a week, labouring on the building site without any financial compensation in return. Jobs included “bricklaying, carpentry, woodwork,” Davies told us. But it is also claimed there was no effort by VOUK to provide residents with any qualifications by the end of the project, unlike on projects run by similar recovery programmes.
When asked directly if any of the people he was managing on the day-to-day work for the Cwmbran Victory Church were paid, Davies responded by saying “No, nothing at all.” Ross Grant confirms this.
Davies also told us that it used to be different under the previous managers. “You agree when you came that it was a work programme. But it wasn’t a work programme when you were told ‘get on with the job.’ You had staff members with you and they were teaching you things.” According to Davies, this all changed when Taylor held the reigns. “When Richard was there all that stopped. At the time, the church became the main priority. You basically didn’t have a choice, you had to go and that was it, tough.”
“[The residents] were taught a trade,” Lee said about life under the old managers. “They had people coming in, they were allowed to go to college. They were allowed to further their education. Richard put a flat-out stop to that. I said what about college for the guys on a Tuesday and a Friday. No. That was stopped. I used to take boys to the evening school for carpentry, that was stopped.”
Safety on site was also said to be almost non-existent. We asked Ross Grant if workers were given adequate protective gear like gloves, hard hats, or steel toe-cap boots for the site work. “What protective gear? There was no [personal protective equipment] at all. We were just in trainers and old clothes.”
These allegations have been corroborated by another source who has spoken to voice.wales under condition of anonymity and had seen residents working unpaid first-hand. A local tradesman who frequented the work-site, he told us: “When I was in the warehouse the boys were working with forklifts trying to paint things up high, up on temporary scaffolding… health and safety was very dodgy.”
In addition to his eyewitness account, he had heard the stories from the residents themselves: “They used to all come up to me, one at a time, sit down and tell me what they had to do… I understand that on the programme you need to keep them busy doing bits and pieces, this that and the other, but to do that all the time…”
Lee told us that Taylor worked the residents hard. “Richard was a flat-out slave-driver. We had to go down [to the Victory Church site] for 9am… I was there many a time until 7, 8, 9 o’clock at night with lads with me. I was told to do a job and it had to be done that day and it had to be done.”
When residents tried to stand up to Taylor and staff at VOUK, Ross said, they were threatened with being thrown out back onto the street: “There was an incident where they tried to make us work on a Saturday and we told them ‘no’… they said ‘we’d kick you out’ if we didn’t work.” He told us that Sundays were the only day off for many residents, and that was only to make time to worship.
This is corroborated by Lee’s experiences: “How I was spoken to, ‘if you don’t [work] you can pack your bags and piss off’… we were told ‘if you didn’t like it you can leave’. But Richard knew… that some of these staff, like myself, had nobody, no family, and nowhere to go. We didn’t have a choice.”
Ross also claims that he and other residents were sent to his new-build, four-bedroom house in Cwmtillery, since vacated by the Taylor family, to do odd-jobs around the house. The work, corroborated by our anonymous source, ranged from plumbing and gardening, to assembling flat-pack furniture and other menial tasks. When Taylor and his family decided to move homes, he again used the unpaid labour of residents to prepare, pack, and move the family home.
Lee Davies worked on the property for next to nothing. He told us: “Richard would have things like painting and decorating done. Things like cutting the gardens, even to the point of washing the bloody cars. He had a garage bit that was supposed to be his office but he had it converted into a games room for the kids….he had a TV on wall. I know that because I did all the work for it. I hung the doors, I put the TV on the wall.”
“They pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes,” Ross told us. “The boys signed up for a therapeutic project… if you’re not learning anything and you’re just doing a 9-to-5 job, not getting paid, and you’re in rehab then it’s not a good thing to be at. Nine times out of ten people would leave and they would end back up in the same place, sometimes people end up dead because of it.”
Ross Grant has told us that he has reported the allegations to the police. voice.wales contacted Gwent Police and they said they couldn’t comment on ongoing investigations concerning named individuals.
In a statement, Victory Church said that “Since 2014, Victory Church has had no affiliation with Victory Outreach UK or the previous Pastor Richard Taylor who was asked to step down.
A new board and minister were inducted by Elim in 2014 following the change of leadership. The church passed all information relating to the previous leadership to independent bodies and left it in the hands of the authorities to handle.”
Richard Taylor and Victory Outreach UK have been contacted for comment.
1 Comments
Comments are closed.