Slavery on the High Street: BBC documentary uncovers shocking modern slavery at London bread factory

Victims were also forced to work at a McDonald’s in Cambridgeshire and a similar factory in Hertfordshire.

The gang forced 16 victims to work at either the fast-food restaurant or the factory - which supplied Asda, Co-op, M&S, Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Waitrose.

Reporting restrictions have prevented coverage of much of the case, but a new BBC documentary Slavery on the High Street, reveals the true scope of the gang’s crimes.

These include trafficking the victims from the Czech Republic, forcing them to work up to 70 – 100 hours a week, confiscating their passports, and controlling them through fear and violence.

The victims earned at least the legal minimum wage, but the vast majority of their pay was stolen by the family-run criminal network, led by brothers Ernest and Zdenek Drevenak.

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While victims lived on a few pounds a day in cramped accommodation – including a leaking shed and an unheated caravan – police discovered their work was funding luxury cars, gold jewellery and a property in the Czech Republic for the gang.

On several occasions, victims escaped and fled home only to be tracked down and trafficked back to the UK.

Nine victims were forced to work at the McDonald’s branch in Caxton, Cambridgeshire. Nine worked at the pitta bread company, with factories in Hoddesdon in Hertfordshire and Tottenham in north London, which made supermarket own-brand products.

Missed signs of slavery

Two former colleagues of the victims who worked at the McDonald’s branch told the BBC the extreme hours the men worked. But well-established signs of slavery, including paying the wages of four men into one bank account, were missed.

At the McDonald’s, at least four victims’ wages – totalling £215,000 – were being paid into one account, controlled by the gang.

Other undetected red flags included:

• Victims were unable to speak English, and job applications were completed by gang members, who were even able to sit-in on job interviews as a translator.
• Victims worked extreme hours at the McDonald’s – up to 70 to 100 a week. One victim worked a 30-hour shift. The UN’s International Labour Organization says excessive overtime is an indicator of forced labour.
• Multiple employees had the same registered address. Nine victims lived in the same terraced home in north London while working at the bakery.

The exploitation ended in October 2019 after victims contacted police in the Czech Republic, who then tipped off their British counterparts.

Six members of the family-run human trafficking network have been convicted in two criminal trials, which were delayed by the Covid pandemic.

Dame Sara Thornton, the former independent anti-slavery commissioner, said: “It really concerns me that so many red flags were missed, and that maybe the companies didn’t do enough to protect vulnerable workers.”

She added that she would have expected the retailers to be doing “pretty thorough due diligence,” saying that they normally “take much greater care about their own brand products because that’s their reputation that’s on the line”.

Pavel, one of the victims – who waived his legal right to anonymity – was homeless in the Czech Republic when he was approached by the gang in 2016.

He says he was lured in with the false promise of a well-paid job in the UK, where he could at the time work legally. But the reality of his experience has left lasting scars. He says: “You can’t undo the damage to my mental health, it will always live with me.”

“We were afraid… If we were to escape and go home, [Ernest Drevenak] has a lot of friends in our town, half the town were his mates.

“I do feel partially exploited by McDonald’s because they didn’t act… I thought if I was working for McDonald’s, that they would be a little bit more cautious, that they will notice it.”

Det Insp Melanie Lillywhite said that the gang “treated their victims like livestock” feeding them just enough “to keep them going”.

She added that victims were controlled by “invisible handcuffs”, monitored by CCTV, prevented from using phones or the internet and unable to speak English. “They really were cut off from the outside world,” she said.

The McDonald’s outlet in question was run by two different franchise-holders between 2015 and 2019, when the victims worked there. The BBC contacted both, but they did not respond.

McDonald’s UK said the current franchisee had only been “exposed to the full depth of these horrific, complex and sophisticated crimes” in the course of his co-operating with police and the prosecution.

The bakery company supplied bread to most of the major supermarkets, including Asda, Co-op, M&S, Sainsbury’s, Tesco, and Waitrose. But none detected slavery during the four years. All pulled out of contracts in 2020 or 2021, and the company ceased trading and went into administration in 2022.

The Modern Slavery Act requires larger companies – including McDonald’s and the supermarkets, but not the factory itself – to publish annual statements outlining what they will do to tackle the issue.

Former Prime Minister Baroness Theresa May, who introduced the act as Home Secretary in 2015, accepted the law failed to protect victims in this case, saying it needs to be “beefed up”.

The former PM – who now leads the Global Commission on Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking - said the case was “frankly shocking” and shows “large companies not properly looking into their supply chains”.

The government said it would “set out next steps on the issue of modern slavery in due course”.