Déjà vu? The risks of migrant worker exploitation in construction

As the summer recess draws to a close and MPs gear themselves up for the heady winds of autumn conference season, the government might be feeling quietly buoyant. In particular, figures for the UK’s gross domestic product (GDP) between April and June showed an increase of 0.3%, defying expectations that economic growth had come to a standstill in the spring months.

Given Labour’s mission of “kickstarting economic growth”, this will be welcome news - but we also know the government wants to go further. In June, the government published its long-awaited Industrial Strategy, setting out its plans to turbocharge growth by focusing on eight key sectors including advanced manufacturing, financial services, and defence. The construction sector features in the government’s plans as a key foundational industry, with promises of modernisation and as much as £625m in funding to train up to 60,000 skilled workers in the sector by 2029. 

Though seemingly ambitious, we also know that this pales in comparison to what the sector itself claims to need, not least to meet the government’s housebuilding target of 300,000 new homes every year in this Parliament. For example, the Construction Industry Training Board recently estimated that an extra 240,000 construction workers would be needed over the next five years. At the same time, the government is trying to reduce inward migration - but perhaps to the sector’s relief, access to migrant construction workers will still be allowed under a reformed work visa system.  

What will this mean for migrant workers, and for the government’s hopes of running a work visa system that isn’t embroiled in allegations of exploitation and poor governance?This policy briefing draws on our work providing free employment legal advice to hundreds of construction workers to identify the exploitation risks in the sector, concluding that mapping it onto the current work visa system will be a perilous exercise. 

Changes to the Skilled Worker visa and creation of the Temporary Shortage List

The government’s immigration white paper, published in May, proposed a fundamental recalibration of the work visa system. Moving forward, new recruits under the Skilled Worker visa would have to meet a minimum skill level of RQF Level 6 (degree level), resulting in around 180 occupations being taken off the list of eligible occupations. The planned exception to this would be occupations contained on the newly coined Temporary Shortage List.

Here, occupations with a lower skills requirement of RQF3-5 would be permitted provided that they are key to the UK’s industrial strategy or delivering critical infrastructure, and following advice from the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC). Sectors would have to have proper workforce strategies in place to maximise domestic recruitment and have their strategies assessed by the MAC before a positive recommendation for inclusion on the Temporary Shortage List could be made to the Home Secretary. 

The white paper also confirmed the MAC’s role in making recommendations about visa terms and conditions, including time limits and a potential cap on the number of visas granted. Notwithstanding all of the above, at the same time the white paper was released, the Home Secretary was quick to confirm that “construction workers will be on the Temporary Shortage List because they are clearly crucial to growth in our economy”.

As for workers themselves, the new Temporary Shortage List represents a downgrade in anticipated rights and entitlements. For example, new workers arriving in the UK in Temporary Shortage List construction roles will not be able to bring dependants with them. Similarly, the government currently plans for recruitment from this list to end by 31 December 2026. The government’s intention is for access to this labour pool to be temporary by nature. This, combined with the government’s other plans to extend the qualifying periods for settlement in the UK, mean it is currently unlikely that those sponsored to work in Temporary Shortage List roles will in the future be eligible to apply for indefinite leave to remain.

Further insight into the temporary nature of the list can also be gleaned from the Home Office’s response to questions submitted by the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee (SLSC), as part of the parliamentary scrutiny process for the latest Statement of Changes to the Immigration Rules (HC 997). It was confirmed that if a job is removed from the Temporary Shortage List while a worker is already in the UK, their existing permission would continue but they would not be able to apply to extend their stay.

Underlying exploitation risks in the construction sector

Before we examine why the inclusion of construction roles on the Temporary Shortage List could pose a serious risk for workers, it is important to unpack some of the long-standing issues with the sector itself. 

In the latest UK Labour Market Enforcement Strategy, the Director of Labour Market Enforcement identified construction as one of the high priority sectors for exploitation in the UK. The current enforcement bodies have limited activity due to resource pressures, but their assessment alongside that of other stakeholders “demonstrates significant indicators of risk”. 

This chimes with our own experience. Since the Work Rights Centre was founded in 2016, construction has been consistently among the top sectors from which client’s employment grievances have originated. Based on our experience of dealing with hundreds of construction cases in approximately the last four years, we’ve been able to identify some of the key issues raised by workers in that time:

1. Non payment of wages. This was particularly the case for those who were self-employed and for those that had been engaged by smaller contractors in the sector. Non-payment was so common that some workers had accepted this as just being part of a wider industry “norm” that couldn’t be helped.

2. False self-employment. Over three quarters of construction clients reported not having any written terms of employment, which made it very difficult to understand their employment status, and assert even the most basic employment rights, such as entitlement to the National Minimum Wage. Others had a contract for services that misrepresented their employment status as self-employed, even when the work conducted was, in practice, closer to that of workers/employees. Given how basic employment rights are only available to people with worker (and employee) status, this proliferation of false self-employment, was the chief driver of work precariousness among construction clients. 

3. Lack of unionisation. Only a handful of the hundreds of construction clients that we have advised have been unionised. Although this could be a conscious decision on part of workers, and construction is not among the lowest paid occupations, the point of interest here is in access to legal advice and support where the need for those arises. Interestingly, many have not even heard of unions like Unite (which incorporated The Union of Construction, Allied Trades and Technicians in 2017).

4. Fears of reporting exploitation. This was a particularly serious issue for people working on Skilled Worker visas, or on other forms of limited leave. The fear that reporting labour non-compliance might lead to them losing their immigration status (even when workers themselves had not broken any rules) created a culture of acquiescence, and contributed to the feeling that non-payment is part of the norm.

There are also sectoral and structural dynamics that can combine to inhibit workers’ access to justice. For example, the fragmentation of the sector and chains of subcontracting make it harder for workers to challenge non-compliance. In our experience, the smaller the contractor, the higher the likelihood that workers are engaged informally, without written terms, relying on assumed self-employment, in ways which then make it fiendishly difficult to settle any disputes over payment or employment rights.

Similarly, the prevalence of phoenixing - where a company tactically declares insolvency to avoid paying creditors, only to open under a different name - is widespread in the sector. According to the Insolvency Service, the construction industry has the highest rate of company insolvencies of any sector, with 17% of all insolvencies declared in the 12 months to March 2025. While some of them will be legitimate, a proportion will not. Over the years of advising construction workers, we have observed how tactical insolvency makes it near impossible for workers to access justice via the Employment Tribunal or County Court, as any judgment in their favour is very difficult to enforce. 

Construction and the visa sponsorship system - lessons learnt from social care

Construction is, however, far from being the only sector that is affected by these indicators of worker precarity. Recent experience of attempts at using immigration policy to try to drive international recruitment into areas with underlying sectoral issues tells us that this exercise is rarely a smooth one. 

There is perhaps no better example of this than the extension of the Health and Care Worker visa to social care roles. We now know that tens of thousands of migrant care workers who arrived to work in the UK under this visa category ended up being scammed, underpaid, abused and generally treated in a way that contravened employment law and/or Home Office rules and guidance around visa sponsorship. 

A lack of understanding about the sectoral dynamics and challenges in social care, followed by poor governance and administration by the Home Office, led to the exploitation of the sponsorship system by many rogue actors. Equally, the rigidity of the Home Office’s own rules have meant that attempts at resolving the issues for this pool of workers whilst keeping the sector onside have been plagued by issues, leading to a form of regulatory “whac-a-mole”.

Beyond the range of existing non-compliance risks that are shared across these sectors, there are a number of important similarities between construction and social care vis-a-vis the UK’s work sponsorship system. Without adequate mitigation, these could likely lead to similar problems for workers, the government and the sector itself.

How should the government mitigate exploitation risks for migrant construction workers?

Perhaps somewhat mercifully, the number of visas granted for construction related roles since the UK left the European Union has historically been quite low, certainly in comparison to the numbers who arrived to work in social care under the Health and Care Worker visa. For example, between Q1 2021 and Q1 2025, 4,906 grants of entry clearance were made for construction and building trades (SOC2020 code 53), while 7,692 grants of entry clearance were made in respect of Skilled Metal, Electrical and Electronic trades (SOC2020 code 52) in the same period.

There are likely to be a few explanations for this. A previous report by the Construction Industry Training Board noted how construction SMEs were unwilling or unable to engage with the sponsorship system due to the cost and time taken to sponsor a skilled worker. Other prohibitive barriers were identified, including English language requirements, the absence of a route to take on non-UK workers on a self-employed basis and the inability of employers to assess overseas qualifications as a basis for future sponsorship. 

However, given the government’s renewed emphasis on housebuilding targets and the lack of short term alternatives to help meet demand, it is not hard to see a future in which the government makes tweaks to the immigration rules in a bid to make the route more attractive to UK construction firms. For example, it may look to reduce sponsorship costs or relax salary requirements - indeed, the MAC has been commissioned to review the terms and conditions that should apply to the Temporary Shortage List and general salary thresholds, including discounts.

Another way that the government may try to resolve this conundrum, and the risk of exploitation, is by changing the underlying model of recruitment to one centred around labour providers, similar to the short term Seasonal Worker visa. Here, a small number of Home Office licenced labour providers (“scheme operators”) issue Certificates of Sponsorship to workers that allow them to work in the UK horticulture sector for six months. Individual growers work with scheme operators to source their seasonal labour, and workers can switch employers if transferred by the operator that sponsored their visa.

In construction, operating this sort of model would likely require an altered set of rules or a new visa category entirely, but would essentially lift most of the initial financial and administrative burden of recruitment from employers. At least in theory, the model would allow for greater flexibility as workers would be tied to individual scheme operators rather than their current employer.

However tempted the government may be to shift its approach to this model, we are clear that this won’t resolve the issues with exploitation, but will instead create new challenges for workers, businesses and government. We have already seen examples of this on the Seasonal Worker visa, which are explained below.