One night in August 2015, after a long shift at the Bubbles car wash in east London, Sandu Laurentiu was washing himself in the rat-infested shared flat provided by his employer. Shaip Nimani, 53, originally from Kosovo, had illegally bypassed the electricity meter at the property in Bethnal Green and tampered with the fuses to stop them blowing. The plumbing in the damp bathroom was not earthed. While he used the decrepit power shower, Laurentiu was electrocuted and killed.



Car wash worker Sandu Laurentiu, who was electrocuted in the flat provided by his employer. Photograph: Met Police

The death of the 40-year-old Romanian labourer renewed concern about conditions at thousands of hand car washes across the country. The washes, which have mushroomed in petrol stations, car parks and empty forecourts, offer cleaning for as little as £5. Often they employ as many as a dozen workers and are open for up to 12 hours a day, seven days a week. There are suspicions of minimum wage, environmental, planning, and health and safety violations, tax evasion – as well as labour exploitation and modern slavery.

Last year, Nimani received a four-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to manslaughter. But, three years after Laurentiu’s death, and more than a decade after car washes started to become a common sight, the response to the problem is only now gathering pace. Last month, the environmental audit committee (EAC) heard the first oral evidence at an inquiry into hand car washes. MPs will spend weeks hearing from academics, industry representatives and regulators.

Raids on suspected hand car washes are becoming more common. In the past month, police have swooped on sites in Somerset and Manchester. A raid at the end of June on a car wash in Newport in South Wales, ended in tragedy when Sudanese worker Mustafa Dawood, who was 23, fled on to the roof of a neighbouring factory and fell to his death. The Independent Office for Police Conduct is investigating the incident.

There is little agreement about how many hand car washes there are in the UK. Estimates range from 10,000 to 20,000. Less still is known about how many of these may be guilty of infringements. Mechanical car washes, with their fierce rotating bristles, used to be the go-to for drivers in a hurry. Now there is more choice, but little to inform ethical decisions. What is the true cost of a £5 car wash – and what should we be paying?

The rise of hand car washes is the result of what is known as economic restructuring. Petrol stations have closed as drivers fill up at supermarkets. Pubs and their car parks have been abandoned as drinkers fill up at home. Garages and their forecourts have closed as cars become more reliable and locked into service agreements. The businesses among these that remain open, meanwhile, are finding ways to make more money out of their outdoor space.

As entrepreneurs and opportunists have identified abandoned or available land – and a demand among drivers for cheap, effective car washing – changes in the labour market, partly as a result of EU migration, have supplied the workers. For many visitors, car washes are a first job. “They accept car washing for a short period while they improve their language skills and move into other industries,” says Ian Clark, a professor of work and employment at Nottingham Business School. “But there are also car-wash workers without networks who are in a dead end, working there for long periods.”

There are drivers who are only interested in getting the cheapest wash. If it looks too good to be true, it probably is

The EAC heard last month that a car wash costing less than £6 could be funding modern slavery. Crude calculations illuminate the problem. A £5 car wash employing five workers for 10 hours a day would have a minimum wage bill (at £7.83 an hour for workers over 25) of £391.50. That team would need to wash 79 cars a day to bring in that kind of cash, or one car every seven and a half minutes. That’s a doable rate, but it relies on a constant flow of cars and ignores overheads – chemicals, water, equipment, rent, tax – and the need for profit.

Many car washes employ more than five workers. Even if the margins can be higher on valet services, which can cost as little as £12 for a full inside-and-out clean, it’s hard to see how “from £5” pays a living wage. “Last weekend I drove past a car wash that was offering washes for £2.99,” says Darryl Dixon, the director of strategy at the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority (GLAA). “But there are drivers who are only interested in getting the cheapest wash. If it looks too good to be true, it probably is.”

Testimony from car-wash workers is patchy but Clark and others have been able to build a picture of some of the tougher conditions on drenched forecourts. “Like nail bars and small garment manufacturers, car washes are what we call ‘hard-to-reach places’,” Clark explains. As part of a study of washes, Clark and his team spoke to workers from 45 hand car washes in the east Midlands. They found no cases of modern slavery or people trafficking, “but we have developed a theory of more routine exploitation of workers”, he says.

The academics met and observed workers who lacked waterproof boots or trousers, or hi-vis jackets and gloves. “They’re spraying around hydrochloric acid solution for alloy wheels, breathing in the vapour and fumes,” Clark says. “We also found wage theft of between 15% and 43%.” That is to say, some workers were paid a little over half the minimum wage.

‘Workers are spraying around hydrochloric acid solution, breathing in the vapour and fumes.’ Photograph: Tomasz Zajda/Getty Images/EyeEm

Anecdotal evidence from elsewhere has suggested a rise in trench foot and chemical burns. At one wash, workers were reportedly paid only in the coins they were able to hoover out of car seats. Car washes that take only cash fuel suspicions of tax avoidance or organised crime. Then there is the environmental damage. “You’ve got to look out for what they’re washing on,” says Dawn Frazer, managing director of the Car Wash Advisory Service (CWAS), which has started a WashMark scheme for legitimate car washes. Tarmac, she explains, is porous. “Any chemical used in the wash is going to go straight into the subsoil.” Concrete prevents this, while a sludge trap or similar device should be used to stop chemicals entering waterways or sewers.

Beyond checking for concrete and prices below £6, what can drivers do to avoid potentially problematic car washes? Frazer, who believes £9 is a reasonable minimum price for a basic wash, advises checking for the overall quality of a site. “If it’s being held together with bits of string, that’s another indicator,” she says. Nearby caravans or signs of on-site accommodation are a potential concern, as is an absence of receipts.

While the scale of the problem remains largely unknown, and workers themselves report being reluctant to raise the alarm, drivers are being recruited to help identify problem sites. The church is playing an unlikely role; the Anglican and Catholic churches in England have backed a new Safe Car Wash phone app. It asks drivers for a site’s location and name (if there is one), followed by a series of questions about it and its workers. It encourages drivers not to confront workers. Instead, the Church of England’s Clewer Initiative against anti-slavery, which launched the app on 4 June, shares the data with the National Crime Agency and the GLAA, among other authorities. If answers to the questions about safety gear and other observations suggests a potential problem, users are also encouraged to contact the Modern Slavery Helpline.

Car-wash workers should be equipped with protective gloves, boots, clothing and hi-vis jackets. Photograph: Extreme/Getty Images/iStockphoto

“Too often we rush in, you’re on your phone and see all this activity, you give your £6 and drive off,” says Alastair Redfern, the bishop of Derby, who works on anti-slavery projects in the church and the House of Lords. “We’re just saying, please stop and think first.” The Clewer Initiative says the app was downloaded more than 5,000 times in its first month, while the charity Unseen, which runs the slavery helpline, said last week that 11 cases indicating 69 potential victims had been reported to it through the app.

But concern about car washes that may be contravening one or several laws and regulations should not lead to assumptions about all such businesses, Frazer adds. There are legitimate businesses that offer competitive prices. That some car washes might have sub-standard drainage does not necessarily mean they are fronts of organised crime. “And if workers look a bit bedraggled, it doesn’t mean it’s all to do with modern slavery – you cannot generalise in that way,” Frazer adds.

To help distinguish between the good, the bad and the not entirely legitimate, the CWAS, which is funded by industry membership, is promoting its WashMark certificate of quality and compliance. Businesses that want the badge must share their company accounts and employment and environmental practices with a visiting inspector. Regular, unannounced visits follow the award of the mark. But there were only a dozen accredited sites at the time of writing. While Frazer is training 10 new staff, and hopes to audit 120 sites in the next three months, making an impact on the industry any time soon looks like a tall order.

There is also a rival scheme, which further complicates the issue. The GLAA is developing a code of practice for the estimated 500 car washes operating on supermarket car parks, which would be regulated by the supermarkets. These would represent a small fraction of the total car washes in operation, but Dixon, at the GLAA, says engaging drivers in the issue, and making them demand better car washes, creates an incentive for good businesses to improve practices and come forward to get a stamp of approval. “The ones that don’t are the ones where the greatest risk is likely to exist, and therefore we would be better able to target them,” he adds.

Too often we rush in, give your £6 and drive off. We’re just saying, please stop and think first

Supermarkets are already waking up to the problem. Tesco has partnered with Waves, a car washing business based in Surrey, to provide Tesco-branded washes at dozens of its stores. But at the same time, petrol stations that had relied on mechanical washes are switching to hand washes. “It’s a case of ‘can’t beat them, join them’,” says Brian Madderson, a major critic of the hand wash industry as chairman of the Petrol Retailers and Car Wash Associations. “I’m really concerned that our members might be damaging their brands by unknowingly fostering illegal activities on their sites.”

Until the host of authorities whose roles are touched by hand car washes get to grips with the problem, once they have determined its scale in the first place, drivers have to make their own choices. Frazer only visits hand car washes that she knows are compliant, “which is why my car is a bit dirty at the moment”, she says. Meanwhile, although deaths associated with car washes are rare, it is the workers who are paying the price for convenience.

After Nimani was jailed for the death of Laurentiu, the victim’s brother, Marius, described his brother as a kind and loving son who spoke to their mother every week and sent money home. He added: “It appears to me that the employment laws and rules and regulations in the UK are not strong enough, and that more needs to be done to protect the welfare and wellbeing of foreign nationals, to stop incidents like this happening again.”