Work scheme isn’t slavery, court rules

Published on 07/08/2012 01:56

Government back-to-work schemes criticised as “forced labour” have been ruled lawful by the High Court.

A judge rejected jobless graduate Cait Reilly’s claim yesterday that a scheme requiring her to work for free at a Poundland store breached human rights laws banning slavery.

Mr Justice Foskett, sitting at the High Court in London, said that “characterising such a scheme as involving or being analogous to ‘slavery’ or ‘forced labour’ seems to me to be a long way from contemporary thinking”.

Miss Reilly, 23, from Birmingham, and 40-year-old unemployed HGV driver Jamieson Wilson, from Nottingham, both claimed that the unpaid schemes they were on violated article four of the European Convention on Human Rights, which prohibits forced labour and slavery.