Crackdown on illegal workers: Businesses face £60,000 fines as government steps up raids on carwashes
"We're coming down hard on illegal employment”: LBC watches car wash raid by immigration officials
A car wash near a garden centre in Crawley may sound innocuous and small fry, but for ministers it is emblematic of illegal working practices which have been allowed to percolate unchallenged.
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"We're coming down hard on illegal employment to rip away one of those pull factors that means people are coming to the country illegally", Home Officer Minister Mike Tapp tells me.
Donning an official Immigration Enforcement gilet, the MP tells me that such visits have "increased by 50% over past 12 months".
He's alluding to government figures which suggest that in the year from July 2024 - from the general election - there were more than 10,000 visits, with 7,130 arrests, both increases of around 50%.
This Tuesday morning the weather is dull and it's spitting, not really the ideal spectre for a thriving car wash business.
Nevertheless, after a lengthy briefing at nearby Gatwick Airport, this sleepy garden centre car park is about to be inundated with around a dozen officers and officials, and three vans.
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But the government clearly don't mind the perception of heavy-handedness, they are clearly keen to make a fuss of the fact they are cracking down.
Therefore the optics of smashing into a small hut in West Sussex can be helpful in loudly demonstrating that action is being taken.
After around an hour of talking to the three workers who were all present in the container-like office - officers carried out checks and deemed that two of the workers were free to carry on with their day, but that a third individual raised concerns.
"He told me he was here on a health and social care visa, but of course he's working cash-in-hand at a car wash and so is in breach of that visa's conditions", Mr Tapp tells me. The MP joined police in seeking to garner answers from the man of Nigerian descent"
"That's one of the issues that we're seeing with these health and social care visa's, that they're often being exploited. People turn up here and there's either no work, or very limited work which is why we've frozen that route to look at it again".
Just a few minutes later Mr Tapp emerges from a conversation with police and proudly confirms "he's been arrested for that".
Officers can be heard questioning the man who claims to have worked there part time for the past 2 months.
This is just one of hundreds of such visits which take place each week, with this specific raid as part of 'Operation Machanize'.
The National Crime Agency led approach is "a coordinated national activity against money laundering through cash intensive businesses", says Caroline Payne who is the head of operations in the National Economic Crime Centre at the NCA.
"It aims to address money laundering those premises but also the associated criminality which can include laundering the proceeds of drugs criminality, organised immigration crime and other criminality".
"It's really important that law enforcement addresses these problems on the high street, where there is intelligence indicating that there is illegal working or criminality, it's important that policing or associated agencies take action against that to reinforce confidence", the senior NCA official told LBC.
The wider aim for the government is to drive down the numbers and quell the practice of illegal working.
"Smash the gangs" has been the mantra for the government on tackling the thorny issue.
Mike Tapp tells me that this type of activity is part of the answer "alongside deportations, removals, returns agreements, the pilot with the French, the ECHR, and moving people out of [asylum] hotels".