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.”



