Foreign care workers targeted with new visa rules to slash legal migrant numbers
Changes to rules around visas for care workers are at the centre of a comprehensive overhaul of the immigration system announced by the government today.
The plans include a sweeping crackdown on the numbers of visas being handed out for lower-skilled workers.
Social care is set to be one of the sectors most affected, as care homes are told to shift focus to hiring staff from within the UK.
The government plans to do this by closing the care worker visa and asking employers to only recruit foreign staff who have already come to the UK, or by extend existing visas.
The proposals, which will be detailed in an Immigration White Paper tomorrow, have been described as a ‘fundamental shift’ by Home Secretary Yvette Cooper.
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Visa thresholds will also be dramatically tightened up under the new template.
The skilled worker visa will now require a graduate qualification and a higher salary threshold.
For jobs below this level, access to the immigration system will be ‘strictly time-limited’ and only allowed when shortages ‘critical to the industrial strategy’ need filling.
The focus instead will be on encouraging employers to develop domestic training plans to boost British recruitment levels.
While the white paper has been in the works for some time, it is being published less than two weeks after Reform UK achieved a historic set of results in English local elections.
The government’s aim is to reduce the number of people on lower-skilled visas who come into the country by around 50,000.
The changes are all part of a bid to slash net migration, which reached 728,000 in 2024.
While the Conservative Party said they supported the changes, Shadow home secretary Chris Philp said the 50,000 ‘tweak’ was ‘not enough’.
The opposition party are instead going to push a vote in Parliament for an annual cap on migration.
Yvette Cooper defended her own plans, saying: ‘Migration must be properly controlled and managed so the system is fair.
‘Instead, we’ve seen net migration quadruple in the space of just four years, driven especially by overseas recruitment.
‘We inherited a failed immigration system where the previous government replaced free movement with a free market experiment.
‘Employers were given much greater freedom to recruit from abroad while action on training fell.’
The focus on higher-skilled migration and training people in the UK means the government will ‘prevent’ care homes from recruiting abroad.
The Home Secretary said that the sector can still recruit from the about 10,000 people who came on a care worker visa to the UK but then had their sponsorship visa cancelled.
‘Care companies should be recruiting from that pool of people, rather than recruiting from abroad, we are closing recruitment from abroad,’ Cooper added.
‘We’re doing it alongside saying we need to being in a new fair pay agreement for care workers.’
The reforms, expected to come in later this year, will also give the immigration officials wider powers to remove foreign nationals convicted of offences.
Currently only foreign criminals who receive a jail sentence are reported to the Home Office.
They often only be considered for deportation if those sentences stretch longer than a year.
The new measures will make it easier to deport those who commit offences, including violence against women and girls, street crime and knife crime.
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