Less than 4% of exploited care workers reported to have found new work by government scheme, FOI data reveals
Since the first reports of migrant care worker exploitation under the Health and Care Worker visa emerged some years ago, successive governments have tried to intervene to prevent exploitation and assist those workers affected by it.
Despite our and unions’ calls for wider visa reform and worker flexibility, the government’s only worker-facing response has been funding a sponsor rematching support programme for migrant care workers who have been displaced as a result of sponsor licence revocation action taken by the Home Office.
By the government’s own admission, some 39,000 workers were affected by the Home Office’s clampdown on sponsors in the sector between July 2022 and December 2024, which saw at least 470 sponsors lose their licences. Yet little has been known about the sponsor rematching scheme and its efficacy - until now.
Drawing on fresh data obtained via Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, in this blog post we find that only 3.4% of migrant care workers signposted by UKVI for job finding support were successful in getting new work via a government scheme, according to reports by regional service providers. We analyse what this means for workers, the social care sector, and why the government needs to do more to tackle exploitation.
What is the rematching scheme?
The migrant care worker rematching support programme is delivered in England by 15 regional partnerships, composed of local government and care sector stakeholders, and funded by the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) via the International Recruitment Fund (IRF).
The IRF was first announced by DHSC on 10 February 2023 with the broad aim of helping to “tackle the barriers of international recruitment, while upholding ethical recruitment and employment practices”. Initially, responding to sponsor licence revocations and helping to rematch affected workers was not a core output of IRF funding. However, by 2024 funding was continued to focus primarily on “in-country matching of overseas recruits who have been displaced by unethical practices or by their employer’s sponsorship licence being revoked”. To date, the programme has attracted a total of £31 million in DHSC funding, with an additional £12.5 million allocated for the next 12 months.
In 2024, regional partnerships started setting up central mailboxes through which affected workers could contact their local service. Some also committed to providing pastoral and signposting services and supporting care provider compliance with UK Visas and Immigration (UKVI) processes. In 2024, UKVI began to directly email workers affected by sponsor licence revocation with a view to facilitating workers’ engagement with their local regional partnership.
Figure 1: Number of emails the UKVI sent to care workers whose sponsors' licenses were revoked, signposting them to the rematching scheme. Source: FOI to Home Office
New FOI data
Information obtained by the Work Rights Centre through a series of FOI requests casts new light on the government’s rematching programme.
A first FOI revealed that between May 2024 and May 2025, a total of 28,621 emails were sent by the Home Office to displaced migrant care workers (i.e. migrant care workers whose sponsor licence status is currently revoked). The majority of these emails were sent out in November and December 2024, coinciding with the launches of regional email inboxes (see Figure 1).
Perhaps more importantly however, a second FOI has revealed that as of 30 April 2025, just 941 workers, or 3.4% of those signposted by UKVI for support by March, had reported finding alternative employment with bona fide visa sponsors (Table 1). Out of 15 regions funded by the government to support workers with sponsor rematching, 13 had rematched fewer than 200 workers, and one region matched just a single worker to a new role.
Table 1: Regional partnerships self-reported data on the number of international care workers who have contacted them for support, and those supported into new employment. Source FOI to DHSC.
About the data
The 3.4% figure was obtained by dividing the number of care workers who found a new job, according to our FOI to the DHSC, by the number of emails sent by the Home Office to migrant care workers from March 2024 to April 2025. We omitted the emails sent in May 2025 from our calculation, to account for the fact that service providers will have needed at least a month to support workers.
There are a number of caveats to this data. DHSC data is based on outcomes reported by regional partnerships themselves, which may omit successful rematches that were never included in those reports. This could under-estimate the 3.4% success rate of the partnerships.
Conversely, the number of individuals who found a new sponsor may include both “displaced” workers (referred by UKVI) and other workers (who may have self-referred), potentially inflating the success rate of the support.
The FOI from the Home Office provides data on the emails the UKVI attempted to send to migrant care workers. This is almost certainly an under-representation of the actual number of migrant workers who needed to find a new job, but could not be contacted by email.
Nevertheless, we used this as the denominator in our calculation as it is the best estimate of the population of migrant care workers affected by sponsor non-compliance, and referred to government's support.
The 3.4% figure suffers from some caveats, but it represents the best estimate yet of how well the rematching support has been working. The conclusion is: not very well.
What are the consequences of this ineffectiveness?
Despite the best efforts of regional partnerships to rematch displaced migrant workers, many are still in limbo months and even years after being affected by exploitation.
Our frontline advisers are reporting that people in this cohort are unable to support themselves financially and are only getting by with the help of friends and family. As a growing pool faces the prospects of destitution and homelessness, there is a serious risk of re-exploitation and even greater hardship.
The government must take urgent action to resolve this situation - not by relying only on the rematching support scheme, but by giving workers the flexibility to take up any jobs they can find in the social care sector, without the pressure of having to find a Home Office approved sponsor and the cost of making another visa application. Given the Home Office’s role in creating this crisis, there is a clear duty to safeguard individuals affected.
It is vital that the government does not begin enforcement action against members of the displaced pool and instead focuses on how it can give workers more flexibility to enter new employment. Wider changes, including extending the time that workers formally have to find alternative sponsorship and increasing the fines and penalties applicable to rogue actors, should also be considered.
The immigration white paper misses the mark
This fresh data calls into question the viability of the government’s recent announcement to end international recruitment in social care, as per the immigration white paper released in May.
Part of the government’s rationale was that thousands of displaced workers in England would be given the opportunity to do the jobs they were initially promised, and that this, alongside a boost in the domestic care workforce, would help to meet labour shortages.
This new data and the lack of clarity on whether a new comprehensive funding package for social care is forthcoming in the 11 June Spending Review, means that the government’s plans might be at risk of going up in smoke before they have even got off the ground.
Given these dynamics, giving displaced care workers greater flexibility to work in the social care sector more generally is not only the right and dutiful thing to do, but increasingly appears also to be a financially sensible option.
Conclusion
We will be releasing a major new report looking at the barriers to rematching under the programme, and the views of both partnership stakeholders and workers who sought their support, at the end of this month.
Until then however, the data on the government’s care worker rematching programme paints a stark picture of ineffectiveness. The national crisis of displacement affecting thousands of migrant families is far from over, and only swift and urgent action will help to relieve the pressure that they, regional partnerships, and social care stakeholders are currently under.
As we have continuously argued, giving workers flexibility is not only beneficial for workers but also good for ethical businesses that respect their workforce and are a key part of the government’s growth mission. The situation facing displaced care workers is no different. The Home Office recently mentioned that they had “learned a lot” from their experience of setting up the Health and Care Worker visa route and expanding it into social care. Now is the time to prove it.
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