‘Town’s getting multicultural and that’s good’: How Swindon views changes in its workforce
The arrival of the Victorian railway turned Swindon into one of the fastest-growing industrial towns in the UK.
Workers flocked to the thriving Wiltshire hub from all over Britain.
In more recent times, Swindon has been attracting people from further afield – so many, in fact, that one in five of the town’s population was born abroad.
In 2011, 26,911 people in Swindon were born outside the UK. By 2021, that figure had risen to 47,656. The British-born population, by comparison, had risen from 182,215 to 185,754.
On Manchester Road there are a host of shops, with signs boasting goods from all over Eastern Europe and South Asia. There are dozens of small businesses with diverse heritage.
Asher Graham, who owns a barber shop on the street and has lived in Swindon all his life, says he has seen a change over the last few years: “The town’s getting multicultural and that’s good.
“That’s what we need and like – everyone’s just getting to work.”
Mr Graham employs two foreign-born barbers – one, Gaja Sherlekar, 50, is from Goa. He tells us: “There are many opportunities here so people are coming from abroad.”
The barber shop is busy, and soon Mr Sherlekar finds himself cutting the hair of British-born Jamie Carash.
Mr Carash, 50, owns his own business, and declares: “A lot of foreigners [are] coming over and driving the prices down, but again I did end up taking two of them on as well…their work ethic is better than most of my guys.”
But Mr Carash insists that there are not enough controls on immigration.
“I just think it’s gone a bit too far,” he says, adding: “I mean some places you go to in England… you’re kind of an outsider in your own country.”
Across the UK there’s been a significant increase in the number of foreign-born workers.
From January to June this year, there were 6.8 million foreigners in employment across Britain – 20.7% of the UK workforce. In the same period in 2014, there were 4.6 million foreign workers – 15% of the working population.
Migrant men are more likely to be in work than their British-born counterparts – 82% of working-age men are employed, compared to 78% of UK men.
Foreign-born workers also lead in high-skilled jobs – 36% of those born outside the UK are in specialist employment, ahead of 33% of British workers.
These statistics are likely to reinforce views on both sides of the immigration debate.
Some will see them as evidence that migrants are essential to Britain’s economy, while others will claim that immigrants are taking the jobs of British workers.
In Swindon town centre, sheltering from a June downpour, we meet Jason who’s in his fifties, unemployed and looking for work.
He believes immigration is a big problem for him. “I can’t get a job. They come to this country, they can just get a job just like that,” he says.
Christine, shopping with her son Jack, said the UK has always taken in genuine refugees
He then reveals he has a criminal record and served time in prison for assault around three years ago, a reason why, he claims, some employers have refused his application. Even so, he insists immigrants are to blame for his joblessness.
Other people, however, say they welcome workers from abroad.
Christine, out shopping with her adult son Jack, tells us: “We’ve always been that sort of country that is taking in genuine refugees.
“At the end of the day we do need people from around the world to help with certain jobs.
“Where I live, near a farming community, they’re really struggling with trying to get people to come in.”
At a car wash near Swindon’s train station all the staff are recent migrants.
The manager, Fazlumenallah Azizi, 50, employs them and admits he came to the country on the back of a lorry as an Afghan asylum seeker back in 2001.
But he thinks immigration has now gone too far in Britain, putting pressure on public services. “If you’re going to the hospital now you have to wait three to four hours now, that’s an example,” he complains.
But Mr Azizi isn’t convinced by people who say that he could be giving jobs to UK-born workers instead.
“Yeah, they could say that, but I don’t know if you ask them to come and work in the car wash, I don’t think they would come.”
Emma George, 53, runs a law firm in Swindon’s Old Town with her husband, Francis.
She has repeatedly recruited foreign staff whose applications stand out. “I think our homegrown students or graduates aren’t really as driven as those coming from overseas,” she believes.
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Stella George’s family worries how immigration has become such a political battleground
Bianca Milea, 30, works at the firm as a paralegal. She came to the UK from Romania eight years ago with no plan and “wanted an adventure”. She worked as a waitress and in a call centre before studying for a law degree.
She rejects the idea that she has replaced a British worker: “I don’t think that I’m taking anyone’s place because I worked to be where I am today.”
Emma’s daughter, Stella, 19, is helping at the firm while home from university.
Both mother and daughter worry that immigration has become such a political battleground not just in the UK but across Europe.
Mrs George says: “It actually makes me feel quite sad and quite frightened, actually, for the future, because I fear it’s all very negative.”
Her daughter agrees: “I think the kind of narrative that they’re spreading at the moment that there’s all these negatives to immigration is just really dangerous for anyone who’s ever emigrated at all.
“That just turns into casual racism, I think, amongst the general population.”
For all the tough talk on migration by politicians, successive governments have allowed foreign workers to keep coming.
That’s because British industry argues it needs them – despite the concerns of those who feel their country is changing as a result.
The US has agreed to spare the UK from threatened trade tariffs on pharmaceutical products.
The announcement was made following months of uncertainty over whether exports from the UK, and elsewhere across Europe, would be subject to steep charges.
Via the policy update, the UK has become the only country in the world to secure a zero per cent tariff on pharmaceuticals exported to the US. Tariffs are taxes imposed on imports into a country.
In return, the UK has agreed to increase the baseline threshold used to assess if medicines can be used by the NHS.
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The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) will increase the base threshold by 25%: from £20,000-£30,000 to £25,000-£35,000.
It means NICE will be able to approve medicines that deliver significant health improvements but might have been declined purely on cost-effectiveness grounds, the government said.
This could include breakthrough cancer treatments, therapies for rare diseases, and innovative approaches to conditions that have long been difficult to treat, it added.
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Many items require rare earth materials for manufacture and China has an abundance.
This will give NICE the opportunity to approve more new medicines and allow a greater number of patients to benefit from them, the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI) said.
It pointed out that NICE’s baseline cost-effectiveness threshold has not been increased for over 20 years.
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A US government statement said the UK will “reverse the decade-long trend of declining National Health Service (NHS) expenditures on innovative, life-saving medicines, and increase the net price it pays for new medicines by 25%”.
US trade representative Jamieson Greer said the US “will work to ensure that UK citizens have access to latest pharmaceutical breakthroughs”.
The background
US President Donald Trump has long complained that Europe does not pay enough for US drugs.
America and the UK agreed in May to seek a deal on the proviso that firms secured a better operating environment in Britain.
Criticism includes the concern that firms lose out on revenue due to a pricing regime which prioritises low costs for the NHS over incentives to invest.
In October, the science minister Patrick Vallance told MPs, as talks with the US continued, that many drugs available in the UK would see an “inevitable” price increase.
The family of a father-of-four who died on holiday in Benidorm say new evidence has further convinced them that foul play was involved in his death.
Nathan Osman, 30, from Pontypridd in South Wales, was on a long weekend break with friends in Benidorm in September 2024.
Less than 24 hours after he arrived, his body was found by an off-duty police officer at the bottom of a remote 650ft (200m) cliff on the outskirts of the resort.
He died from head and abdominal injuries after falling from height, a post-mortem found.
Local police said it was “a tragic accident” that occurred after Nathan left his friends in Benidorm to walk back to his hotel room alone.
But his family believe the investigation into his death has not been adequate, and that the local authorities have never considered the possibility of a homicide.
Their suspicions of foul play were first provoked by the fact that the remote location where Nathan was found was in the opposite direction to the hotel, and some distance away on foot.
They began doing their own investigating, building a timeline of events drawn from sources including CCTV, witness statements and Nathan’s bank records, which they say showed attempts were made to use his bank cards the day after he died.
After presenting their findings to Spanish prosecutors as evidence that others may have been involved, the case was reopened earlier this year.
Now, the family have told Sarah-Jane Mee on The UK Tonight that new phone data they have uncovered suggests he couldn’t have reached the spot he was found on foot.
Nathan’s brother Lee, mother Elizabeth and father Jonathan speak to Sarah-Jane Mee
After getting the phone back a couple of months ago, they say they tracked Nathan’s last movements through a health app.
“There’s a breakdown inside the app of every 10 minutes – the distance, pace, measurement of pace… every detail you can think of,” Nathan’s brother, Lee Evans, tells Mee.
“His pace wasn’t consistent with a fast walk or even a sprint.”
He said it was a faster journey, despite being uphill for 40 minutes, which has convinced the family that he was in a vehicle.
Pic: Family handout
The family also went to visit the area where Nathan was found.
“We were a bit upset, but we were very pleased we went up there”, his mother, Elizabeth, says. “We could see… there’s no way he would have looked at that area and thought, ‘I’m going up here.’
“You can see straight off, there’s no clubs, there’s no hotels up there, there’s just the odd house dotted around. It was just out in the wild, there was nothing up there.”
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The family says the phone data has helped them determine that he died around half an hour after he was seen on CCTV walking towards his hotel in the early hours of the morning.
“It was really ridiculous to think that my son would’ve walked up there [the remote location where he died] at 4am in the pitch dark.”
After the family were interviewed by Mee in May, South Wales Police opened its own investigation into Nathan’s death.
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Nathan’s family speaking to Mee in May
Lee says the Welsh force has been “appalled” by the lack of evidence turned over from the local police’s investigation.
His and Nathan’s father, Jonathan, says: “No procedures were followed. Nothing was cordoned off, it wasn’t a crime scene. There’s loads of things that could’ve been taken. Tyre tracks, foot tracks, nothing. No DNA taken.”
Lee says: “All that we’ve done over the last year, this could’ve been squashed within the first week, two weeks [by local investigators].
“We’ve had to find out and keep delving into every possible outcome and overturn every stone possible. We started off with… a needle in a haystack, we had no direction or any support on which way to go.”
Nathan Osman. Pic: Family handout
What does Nathan’s family hope for now?
Nathan’s family say they have located 27 CCTV cameras which could have picked Nathan up in the area, after local investigators didn’t find any.
Elizabeth says that after alerting Spanish police to the locations, they were told that the CCTV “wouldn’t be working” or that footage would’ve already been erased.
“They just surmised everything,” she adds.
But the family, who found the last known CCTV footage of Nathan earlier this year, are convinced there is still hope.
Lee says: “There’s a number of CCTV footage in that area. We know there’s a way of finding a vehicle of some sort.”
But the family admit they may never find whoever could be responsible for Nathan’s death because so much time has been lost.
Elizabeth concludes: “Nathan walks with us every day. We all believe that,” adding that “all we want” is to find the ones responsible for his death and for him to “have the respect of a decent investigation”.
Sky News contacted Spanish police, which declined to comment, adding the case is under judicial review and it doesn’t want to hinder the course of the investigation.
South Wales Police told Sky News: “South Wales Police is carrying out enquiries on behalf of HM Coroner and a family liaison officer has been appointed to provide support.”
Watch the full interview with Sarah-Jane Mee on The UK Tonight from 8pm this evening on Sky News.
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