“I should be in a position of helping, not receiving aid,” says one Nigerian woman.
Fraught with emotion and speaking to us anonymously in the narrow corridor of a food bank, she is now destitute despite being promised a job in Britain.
Blessing, not her real name, told us she arrived in the UK three months ago. She says she paid someone she calls an “agent” in Nigeria £10,000 to arrange a job as a carer in the UK.
But when she got here she found there was no work for her.
Her story is part of a wider problem, revealed in a this year showing how the skilled worker visa system is being abused with middlemen allegedly being paid huge sums of money to arrange jobs in the UK as carers that do not exist.
Many of those who can’t get work are struggling to survive, turning to food banks and even sleeping rough.
Blessing is now reliant on handouts.
At a food bank in a Nigerian Community Centre in Greater Manchester she is given a shopping bag of basic supplies – the shelves and crates are packed with donations of bread, cereal, tinned tomatoes and familiar African items like palm oil and beans.
Blessing says: “I’ve always provided for myself. I’m a very hard-working, diligent person. So for me to be here depending on people to eat coming to the food bank to get food isn’t ok with me.
I don’t feel happy about it.
“It makes me feel I’m less of a person. I should be in a position of helping not receiving aid because this is not who I was back in my country.”
‘It makes me feel as though I’m a fool’
Blessing asked us not to contact the British company which sponsored her for fear of repercussions – but showed us her passport and other documents supporting her account of what happened.
I ask her why she didn’t make the application herself. With some irony, she says: “I would have done it myself but there are so many frauds on the internet [in Nigeria] you don’t know what’s real.
It makes me feel as though I’m a fool,” she says.
Blessing says she knows others who have skilled worker visas only to get here and find there’s no work waiting for them.
She sighs: “There are so many. Dozens. I met a lot here and so many are still coming after I’ve come. There’s a big scam going on.”
‘Shameful’ issue
Mary Adekugbe, the founder of the Nigerian Community Centre in Rochdale, says those on skilled worker visas now needing support is a big issue that is increasing her workload – something she describes as “shameful”.