Parliamentary report acknowledges scale of exploitation on the Skilled Worker visa

This report is the most damning evidence yet that the government’s work migration system, premised mainly on the concept of sponsorship, was facilitating the widespread exploitation of migrant workers in the UK. On Friday 4 July, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) released its report on the Skilled Worker visa regime, a route first launched in December 2020 to facilitate labour migration of skilled workers following the UK’s departure from the European Union.

The PAC’s report covers a wide range of areas, including the setup of the Skilled Worker visa route, its interaction with the labour market and addressing skills shortages, its use to plug workforce shortages in social care, how the route has facilitated exploitation, and compliance and customer service issues. We are grateful that our evidence to the Committee was also cited, in relation to issues of worker exploitation.

Below, we set out some of the key findings of the PAC report on issues pertinent to worker welfare, its recommendations for government and what we can expect for the future of the Skilled Worker route.

The PAC report draws an explicit connection between sponsorship and exploitation 

For our purposes, perhaps the most significant finding of the PAC report is the explicit connection that it draws between the sponsorship system and the precarity, and thus exploitation, faced by migrant workers during their employment in the UK. The Committee finds that the Skilled Worker route, premised on sponsorship, “makes migrant workers vulnerable to exploitation” and that there is “widespread evidence of workers suffering debt bondage, working excessive hours and exploitative conditions”.

Parliamentary committees in recent years have touched on the relationship of dependency caused by the sponsorship system and how this can result in exploitation, but this is the most unequivocal statement yet:

The report goes even further than this however, claiming that the Home Office has failed to protect workers in this system. More specifically, the Home Office failed to prevent exploitation from occurring in workers’ home countries, provided ineffective safeguards to workers affected by sponsor licence revocation (particularly in the care sector) and has had an unconvincing approach to preventing modern slavery more generally:

Measures also taken by the Home Office to attempt to deal with issues, particularly those in social care, have not gone far enough. For example, the PAC report notes that the Home Office’s compliance measures had come too little too late for many, with compliance checks less likely to be followed by the many unscrupulous actors that have now been accepted into the Home Office’s approved pool of employer sponsors:

Concerns with the rematching scheme for displaced migrant care workers

The PAC report also noted its concerns with the government’s rematching scheme for displaced migrant care workers. Last week, our research report noted that only 3.4% of contacted workers had actually been rematched into new, ethical employment in the social care sector, calling into question the government’s multi-million pound response. Many of the barriers experienced by both workers and providers in accessing the scheme successfully were structural in nature, meaning more fundamental immigration and care reforms were required. 

The report noted the Home Office’s apparent lack of knowledge over the performance of this initiative, despite having been made a mandatory part of sponsorship requirements in the care sector just a few months previous:

Recommendations of the PAC report

The PAC report outlines a number of key recommendations for the government to improve its governance of the Skilled Worker visa route.

The Home Office and Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) should:

1. Write to the Committee to provide more detail on the decision to end overseas recruitment for care workers, including the expected implications for the sector’s workforce.

2. Work with DHSC to monitor how the route is being used during the transition period to 2028, and update the Committee on the impacts on the care sector; including the extent to which domestic workforce plans are helping to address skill shortages.

The Home Office should work with relevant government bodies to establish an agreed response to tackling exploitation risks and consequences. This should include clear working arrangements for tackling labour market exploitation and abuses; an evaluation of how the regional partnerships are working and the effectiveness of channels for reporting abuses; and explicit arrangements to safeguard migrants when their sponsor’s licence is revoked.

The Home Office must undertake a full assessment of its approach to tackling compliance risks to identify gaps in its response, how to target its resources, and apply lessons from the care sector to other sectors. As part of this, it should: 

1. 1. Develop sector-specific risk assessments, which are updated every six months.

   2. Identify what data is needed to strengthen its response, including how to better understand what happens to people at the end of their visa and the effectiveness of checks on sponsoring organisations.

   3. Set out a clear method of assessing what happens when visas come to an end, specifically what measures are in place or will be put in place to record when people leave the country.

Though we share the PAC’s ambition for the government to heed these recommendations in full, we are also frank that these do not go far enough in tackling the main issues with the Skilled Worker visa and sponsorship as a whole.

For example, the decision to end overseas recruitment for care workers was announced ostensibly as a response to exploitation, but it is not going to achieve these ambitions, either for those displaced in the UK or those who may continue to be exploited in their country of origin. The government has also not provided any impact assessment on the care sector as part of its latest Statement of Changes to the Immigration Rules.

Though we welcome the PAC’s remarks around evaluating channels for reporting abuses and explicit arrangements to safeguard migrants when their sponsor’s licence is revoked, this stops short of providing the detail necessary to lay the foundations for wider immigration reform that would benefit workers. 

We are clear - workers need more time to switch employment in-country, a separate visa category where they are at risk of or have lost their immigration status because of exploitation and there must be greater penalties imposed on those perpetrating abuse. In the context of the PAC’s otherwise robust analysis, this is a frustrating omission.

Finally, it has been clear for a number of years that the Home Office’s central data records are poor at best. Similarly, the Home Office is regularly inspected by the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration (ICIBI), including on issues such as its approach to compliance. Telling the Home Office to improve its approach to data collection and compliance risks is, regrettably, something the department already knows is ripe for improvement, and has been for some time now.

What is next?

The government, in theory, should provide a full response to the PAC’s report, though this is likely to be some months away from being published. In the meantime, the government is pressing ahead with widespread changes to the immigration system, as per its white paper, including in relation to the Skilled Worker visa route. 

As we’ve previously identified, from an exploitation perspective, these changes are worrying, ill thought out and in some cases only likely to cement the precarity that many workers already face in the UK. This has been confirmed as much in the latest Statement of Changes to the Immigration Rules, which give rise to serious concerns about the government’s propensity to properly consult on changes that are likely to have a significant impact on various sectors of the economy, not least in social care.

Our message, amplified by many civil society actors, is simple - heed the calls to give workers more flexibility, before we entrench issues of labour exploitation in our immigration system further.