Home Office enforcement against exploitative sponsors hits all-time high, but fails to protect victims
The Skilled Worker visa route has been widely abused by unscrupulous employers, who manipulated the system to exploit migrant workers. The Home Office has finally stepped up its compliance over the last two years, revoking the sponsor licences of a record 1,516 businesses in the last quarter of 2025. We welcome the improved due diligence.
But every licence revocation comes with a cost: workers’ visas are still tied to their non-compliant employers. Unless recognised as victims of modern slavery, which rarely happens, exploited migrants struggle to secure a new immigration status, and have little access to remedy.
We are calling on the government to urgently address this issue, as it ramps up enforcement activity, by reforming the Skilled Worker visa route and implementing a compensation scheme for exploited workers.
Home Office’s late response against sponsor non-compliance
The rapid expansion of the work sponsorship system was intended to plug gaps in the UK’s labour market after Brexit. Between Q1 2021 and Q4 2025, the number of businesses licensed to recruit foreign nationals nearly quadrupled, from 32,019 to 123,911 (Figure 1).
Figure 1.
While granting Skilled Worker visas to migrant workers partly succeeded in filling vacancies, many unscrupulous employers were able to recruit foreign nationals and abuse the system for personal gain. Tied to their employers, migrants were forced to pay their exploiters unlawful fees, work longer hours for lower pay, and in the worst cases, live in conditions of modern slavery.
The Home Office was initially too slow to respond, failing to conduct adequate due diligence checks and not understanding how its own Skilled Worker route was operating. Rogue businesses were able to recruit thousands of migrants and continue unchecked for years.
In response to widespread accounts of abuse of the Skilled Worker system, the Home Office began improving its regulation of the visa route in 2023. Sponsor licence application checks have become more stringent, safeguarding and risk management systems were strengthened, and non-compliant businesses were targeted with enforcement action.
What enforcement action can the Home Office take?
The Home Office can take action against non-compliant businesses sponsoring migrants on Skilled Worker visas. For less serious breaches, the Home Office can suspend a sponsor’s licence and temporarily prevent them from recruiting new migrant workers until the licence is reinstated. More serious or recurring breaches can result in a sponsor’s licence being revoked. This bans the business from sponsoring migrant workers. If they wish to continue hiring migrant workers, they must make a successful new sponsor licence application, which they can only do following a cooling-off period.
Record sponsor licence revocations
Recently, the Home Office has supercharged its enforcement activity. According to quarterly Home Office sponsorship statistics, it revoked the sponsor licences of 1,516 businesses in Q4 2025 alone (Figure 2). Overall in 2025 there were as many as 3,100 revocations, the highest in any year since records began in 2012.
Figure 2.
Crucially, the revocations reflect widespread abuse in a range of sectors, and not only in care, where instances of worker abuse were well-documented. Data obtained by the Work Rights Centre through a Freedom of Information (FOI) request shows the industries of 1,743 Skilled Worker sponsors, whose license was revoked between Q1 2022 and Q1 2025.
Only one third (569; 33%) were in the “Human Health and Social Worker activities” industry, which includes the care sector (Figure 3). This statistic is reflective of the expansive exploitation we have seen through our casework, affecting workers in industries from hospitality to manufacturing.
Figure 3.
Exploited workers should not be punished for sponsor wrongdoing
When a sponsor loses their licence, affected workers are normally sent a visa curtailment letter, which leaves them with just 60 days to secure their immigration status. This process involves: finding a different sponsoring employer, obtaining a Certificate of Sponsorship (CoS) and submitting a new visa application, all within that narrow timeframe. This is often not feasible, which means that workers risk losing their right to be in the UK through no fault of their own.
Although many in government acknowledged this failing, it remains unaddressed. The only policy intervention to date has been funding a network of sponsor rematching hubs for care workers in England, which has a poor track record. In other sectors, there is no formalised support at all.
The most vulnerable workers may be eligible for assistance through the National Referral Mechanism (NRM), a government system for identifying and supporting victims of human trafficking and modern slavery. Yet because the threshold for being identified as a victim is very high, most exploited Skilled Workers fall out of scope of support.
The Home Office also appears to be bad at identifying potential victims, leading to very few workers being referred into the NRM. The Home Office identified only around 80 potential victims on the Skilled Worker visa between 2022 and 2024, according to data obtained by the Work Rights Centre via a separate FOI request. This is a tiny figure, compared with the more than 39,000 sponsored workers employed by non-compliant businesses in the care sector alone.
The government must urgently reform the Skilled Worker regime
With thousands of licence revocations and no changes to the sponsorship system, the stakes for Skilled Workers are higher than ever.
We welcome this enforcement effort. As the Home Office itself points out, “sponsorship is a privilege, not a right.” But the people who came to the UK in good faith and were subsequently exploited by government-approved businesses are still missing support. In its current design, the system still enables employers to control migrants’ immigration status and livelihoods. And what’s worse, the government now wants to tie workers to their sponsors even longer, by radically restricting their right to settlement.
The sponsorship system needs to change. Workers who have been abused by their sponsors should receive compensation and access support to rebuild their lives. The government should also act on its May 2025 white paper commitment to explore making it easier for migrant workers to switch jobs and escape exploitative employment, and abandon the settlement changes.
Revoking licences is just the start. If it is serious about curbing labour exploitation, the government must address the greater risks inherent in the sponsorship system.
Read our 2025 report Safeguarding sponsored workers to understand how a compensation scheme for exploited and displaced migrant workers would work.