Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has announced the closure of the care worker visa for overseas recruitment as part of the government's immigration reforms.
The upcoming Immigration White Paper, due Monday, will detail changes preventing the visa's use for international recruitment.
However, companies can still recruit from a pool of existing care visa holders already in the UK, initially intended for unfilled positions. The White Paper will also address skilled visa thresholds and tighten restrictions on recruitment for jobs listed as experiencing shortages.
Officials are looking to bring down net migration, which reached 728,000 in 2024, but ministers are not going to set an overall target, which Ms Cooper labelled as a “failed approach”.
The Home Secretary told Sky News on Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips that ministers are going to “introduce new restrictions on lower-skilled workers” because “what we should be doing is concentrating on the higher-skilled migration and we should be concentrating on training in the UK”.
“We will be closing the care worker visa for overseas recruitment,” she added.
Under current rules, to qualify for a care worker visa a person must have a certificate of sponsorship from their employer with information about the role they have been offered in the UK.
The Home Secretary told the BBC the rules around the system will change to “prevent” it being used “to recruit from abroad” but “we will allow them to continue to extend visas and also to recruit from more than 10,000 people who came on a care worker visa, where the sponsorship visa was cancelled”.
“Effectively they came to jobs that weren’t actually here or that were not of a proper standard,” she added.
“Care companies should be recruiting from that pool of people, rather than recruiting from abroad, we are closing recruitment from abroad,” Ms Cooper said.
She told the BBC that she expects the changes to skilled worker visas combined with changes to the care visa which “will come in in the course of this year” will lead to a “reduction of up to 50,000 fewer lower-skilled visas over the course of the next year”.
However, she declined to put a number on the overall net migration target, telling Sky News it left previous governments with “broken promises”.
“We’re not going to take that really failed approach, because I think what we need to do is rebuild credibility and trust in the whole system,” she added.
Shadow home secretary Chris Philp said he would support the changes to care worker visas, but the 50,000 “tweak” is “not enough”.
“We would go further and tomorrow we intend to push to a vote in Parliament a measure that would have an annual cap on migration voted for and set by Parliament to restore proper democratic accountability, because those numbers were far, far too high,” he said.
According to the Home Office, with the White Paper there will be tighter restrictions on recruitment for jobs with skills shortages, businesses will be supported to take on more British workers and employers will be told to develop plans to train staff in the UK.
In an attempt to reduce the number of low-skilled workers coming to Britain, the skilled visa threshold will be increased to graduate-level.
Officials will also set up a labour market evidence group to examine which sectors are reliant on overseas workers.
The department have also said there will be reforms to deportation and removal rules. Under the proposals, the Home Office will be informed of all foreign nationals convicted of offences and officials say it will make it easier to remove people who commit offences.
The white paper comes less than a fortnight after Reform UK took control of 10 councils in England in the local elections.
Nigel Farage’s party also beat Labour to victory in the Runcorn and Helsby parliamentary by-election.
Deputy leader Richard Tice told Sky News on Sunday that the party’s strong performance in the local elections was “because people are raging, furious, about the levels of both legal and illegal immigration”.
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