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Care homes will no longer be able to hire overseas staff as part of a sweeping clampdown on migration that will heavily restrict UK employers’ ability to use the visa system to fill lower-skilled jobs.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper announced on Sunday that the care worker visa route would be cancelled within months, part of a migration white paper to be published on Monday which aims to radically reduce net inward migration to Britain.
New rules limiting skilled worker visas to graduate level jobs were intended to end what Cooper called a “failed free market experiment”, where employers had been able to recruit freely overseas as the UK’s homegrown workforce shrank and economic inactivity rose.
But she said that while her plans would lead to a “substantial reduction” in the number of people coming to the UK, she would not be setting any numerical target for net migration.
The changes come after the anti-immigration Reform UK party made widespread gains in local elections in England earlier this month, and has pulled ahead of Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour party in opinion polls.
In a sign of the government’s recognition of the political jeopardy if they fail to bring down migration, Starmer on Sunday repeated his promise “to restore control and cut migration . . . with tough new measures”, adding: “British workers — I’ve got your back.”
Cooper told the BBC that the closure of the care worker visa route, combined with other changes mainly affecting low-skilled jobs, would lead to a reduction in arrivals of about 50,000 a year.
Asked if the level of net migration should be less than 500,000 a year, she told Sky News it should “come down significantly more” than that, signalling that ministers will roll out further measures to cut numbers.
The latest data, for the year to mid-2024, showed net migration of 728,000 but the Office for Budget Responsibility expects inflows to fall to less than half that level in the medium term as a result of visa restrictions already implemented by the previous Conservative government.
The latest changes will mean access to visas for non graduate roles will be “strictly time-limited”, granted only where there is strong evidence of shortages critical to the government’s industrial strategy, and linked to efforts to train and recruit UK workers, Cooper said.
In construction, for example, there would be a temporary list of occupations where employers could hire abroad to ease labour shortages while 60,000 more UK workers are being trained.
Chris Philp, shadow home secretary, branded it a “little 50,000 tweak” that was “not enough”. He acknowledged that the Conservative party had taken action “too late” to tackle migration, which peaked above 900,000 in mid 2023 under the previous Tory government.
Cooper also hinted that changes to the visa rules for international students graduating in the UK would be less drastic than feared by universities who rely on their fees. Students would still be able to stay and work in the UK after finishing their courses, she said, but universities would be expected to do more to ensure compliance with visa rules.
The closure of the care visa route will alarm providers of adult social care, who face chronic staff shortages because the funding pressures on local authorities leave them unable to raise wages. There were 131,000 vacancies — accounting for more than 8 per cent of all roles — in 2023-23, according to Skills for Care, the industry’s development and planning body in England.
“Where will these workers come from if neither the funding nor the migration route exists?” asked Jane Townson, chief executive of the Homecare Association, adding that providers were “deeply concerned that the government has not properly considered what will happen to the millions of people who depend on care at home”.
Cooper told the BBC that extensions to existing care worker visas would be permitted and the sector would continue to be able to recruit from the pool of around 10,000 migrants already in the UK “who came on a care worker visa . . . to jobs that weren’t actually here or that were not of the proper standard”.
Care companies “should be recruiting from that pool of people rather than recruiting from abroad,” she said.
The move will come alongside a new “fair pay agreement” for care workers, Cooper said. “We saw that huge increase in care work recruitment from abroad, but without actually ever tackling the problems in the system,” she said, which include low pay deterring UK applicants for roles.
But employers say they will have no means to increase pay without fundamental reform of the way the care sector is funded.
A review of the care system, announced earlier this year by the health secretary Wes Streeting, will put out initial findings next year but will not be complete until 2028.
Richard Tice, Reform UK’s deputy leader, said the public were “raging, furious” about the level of both legal and illegal migration, which he argued accounted for his party coming first in the local elections.
He said the government’s plan was destined to fail and argued that a “separate, dedicated Department of Immigration” with “new people who actually believe in the cause of sovereign borders” was required.
