Care workers will no longer be recruited from abroad under plans to “significantly” bring down net migration, the home secretary has said.
Yvette Cooper told Sky News’ Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips programme the government will close the care worker visa route as part of new restrictions which aim to cut the number of low-skilled foreign workers by about 50,000 this year.
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She said: “We’re going to introduce new restrictions on lower-skilled workers, so new visa controls, because we think actually what we should be doing is concentrating on the higher-skilled migration and we should be concentrating on training in the UK.
“Also, we will be closing the care worker visa for overseas recruitment”.
The move comes ahead of the Immigration White Paper to be laid out this week, which will give more details on the government’s reforms.
Care England, a charity which represents independent care services, described Ms Cooper’s comments as a “crushing blow to an already fragile sector” and said the government “is kicking us while we’re already down”.
Its chief executive Martin Green said international recruitment is a “lifeline” and there are “mounting vacancies” in the sector.
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Cooper refuses to give immigration target
Ministers have already announced changes to the skilled visa threshold to require a graduate qualification and higher salary.
Ms Cooper told Trevor Phillips that this – along with the care worker restrictions – will result in a reduction “probably in the region of up to 50,000 low-skilled worker visas in the course of this year alone”.
However, she refused to give a wider target on the amount the government wants to see net migration come down by overall, only saying that it needs to come down “substantially”.
Ms Cooper said the Conservatives repeatedly set targets they couldn’t meet and her plan was about “restoring credibility and trust”.
She said: “It’s about preventing this chaotic system where we had overseas recruitment soar while training in the UK was cut and we saw low-skilled migration in particular, hugely go up at the same time as UK residents in work or in training fell. That is a broken system. So that is what we need to change.”
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The government is under pressure after it’s drubbing at the local elections, when Reform UK took control of 10 councils in England.
Richard Tice, Reform’s deputy leader, said the party’s strong performance was because people are angry about both legal and illegal immigration and called for immigration to be “frozen”.
He told Trevor Phillips: “The reality is that we’ve just won by an absolute landslide – the elections Thursday last week – because people are raging, furious, about the levels of both illegal and legal immigration in this country.
“We need to freeze immigration because the way to get our economy going is to freeze immigration, get wages up for British workers, train our own people, get our own people who are economically inactive back into work.”
Net migration – the difference between the number of people immigrating and emigrating to a country – soared when the UK left the EU in January 2020.
It reached 903,000 in the year to June 2023 before falling to 728,000 in mid-2024.
According to the Home Office, the number of ‘Health and Care Worker’ visas increased from 31,800 in 2021 to 145,823 in 2023, with the rise primarily due to an increase in South Asian and Sub-Saharan African nationals coming to work as care workers.
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The number decreased significantly in 2024 to 27,174 – due to measures introduced by the Tories and greater compliance activity, the government said.
The crackdown is likely to cause concern in the care sector, which has long warned that low wages are driving a recruitment crisis and is now also being hit by the rise in employer National Insurance.
Speaking to the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, Ms Cooper said there are around 10,000 people in the UK who came on care worker visas for jobs that didn’t exist and “care companies should recruit from that pool”.
“They came in good faith but there were no proper checks, they were badly exploited,” she said.
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Nadra Ahmed, of the National Care Association, told Sky News this was a “scandal of the Home Office’s own making”, with care workers allowed to come to the UK “legitimately but with spurious contracts from profiteers preying on an already fragile sector”.
She added: “Understandably, many of those who are displaced have a preference of which part of the sector they work in or are qualified to do so, based on the promises made to them.
“Our preference would always be to recruit from within our domestic options but sadly we are not able to generate enough interest in social care when the funding remains a barrier to ensure that pay adequately rewards the skills and expertise of our workforce.”
