Care workers will no longer be recruited from overseas as part of a crackdown on visas for lower-skilled workers, the home secretary has told the BBC.
Yvette Cooper said “it is time to end that care worker recruitment from abroad” and rules will change this year – instead requiring firms to hire domestically or extend visas of overseas workers already in the UK.
The government plans to unveil a series of changes to visa and recruitment laws on Monday in a bid to cut net migration, and says measures will cut up to 50,000 lower-skilled workers coming to the UK over the next year.
Shadow home secretary Chris Philp said the plans were “too little” and called for an annual cap on migration.
Successive governments have battled largely in vain to reduce net migration, which is the number of people coming to the UK minus the number leaving.
Net migration climbed to a record 906,000 in June 2023, and last year it stood at 728,000.
The Home Office has not yet officially confirmed what will be in its immigration White Paper, due early next week.
But speaking on the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, Cooper said changes to skilled and care worker visas “will come in in the course of this year and those changes… we expect to lead to a reduction of up to 50,000 fewer lower-skilled visas over the course of the next year”.
She added targets for net migration would not be set, saying “they undermined the credibility of anything that governments do”.
Philp told the same programme that the Conservatives would push for a Parliament vote on installing an annual cap on migration. When asked what the cap would be, he said “we’re working on the detail to specify that number”, but it would be “a further reduction of significantly more than 50,000”.
Cooper also said there would be “some changes” to rules around international students and graduates.
“We will let them continue to come and to stay and to work afterwards,” she added.
“We are making some changes, particularly around the standards and the compliance for universities, because, again, we’ve had problems where some universities haven’t had proper standards in place.
“They’ve recruited people to come as international students who then haven’t completed their courses, have either overstayed or… other problems with compliance of the system.”
The government has already tightened rules around care sector worker after coming to power last July.
Applications for Health and Care Worker visas peaked at 18,300 in August 2023, then collapsed to 1,700 by April this year following the ban on bringing dependants.
And on 9 April, an additional restriction was added requiring care firms who want to recruit a new worker from overseas to prove they attempted to recruit a worker from within England first.
But the new rules will now require care companies to recruit from domestic workers or a pool of over 10,000 care workers in the UK with cancelled sponsorships before hiring from abroad.
Alongside this Cooper promised “to bring in a new fair pay agreement for care workers” to make care jobs more attractive to UK workers and reduce overseas demand.
