UK immigration crackdown halt visa issuance for foreign care workers

• Published On: 11 May 2025 at 19:05

Yvette Cooper, the United Kingdom Home Secretary, has announced plans to cease the recruitment of foreign care workers as part of measures to significantly cut net migration.

Cooper revealed this when appearing on Sky News' Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillihe.

She stated that the government will stop the care worker visa route, seeking to reduce the number of low-skilled foreign workers by approximately 50,000 this year.

"We're going to impose new limits on lower-skilled workers, including visa controls, because we believe that we should be focussing on higher-skilled migration and training in the UK.

"Also, we will be closing the care worker visa for overseas recruitment," Cooper informed the press.

The Immigration White Paper, due out this week, will give into additional detail about the government's intended reforms.

Ministers have previously announced that skilled worker visa restrictions will be tightened, including a new graduate qualification requirement and a higher minimum wage cap.

The Home Secretary informed Trevor Phillips that new immigration policies, including curbs on care worker visas, are anticipated to reduce the number of low-skilled worker visas by up to 50,000 this year.

Ms Cooper, on the other hand, declined to identify a broader objective for lowering net migration, saying simply that it must be reduced "substantially."

Cooper chastised the Conservatives for repeatedly setting unrealistic goals, claiming that her strategy focusses on "restoring credibility and trust."

"It's about preventing this chaotic system in which we saw foreign recruiting soar while training in the UK was reduced, and we saw low-skilled migration, in particular, skyrocket while UK residents in work or training declined. That's a faulty system. So that's what we need to fix," she explained.

Cooper continued, "The reality is that we just won by an incredible landslide - the elections on Thursday last week - because people are raging, enraged, over the proportions of both illegal and legal immigration in this nation.

"We need to freeze immigration because the way to get our economy going is to freeze immigration, get wages up for British workers, train our own people, get our own people who are economically inactive back into work."

Following the UK's withdrawal from the EU in January 2020, net migration, or the gap between those entering and leaving the nation, increased dramatically.

It peaked at 903,000 in the fiscal year ending June 2023, then fell to 728,000 by mid-2024.

According to the Home Office, the number of 'Health and Care Worker' visas increased from 31,800 in 2021 to 145,823 in 2023, driven mostly by an influx of South Asian and Sub-Saharan African immigrants working as care workers.

However, the figure fell dramatically to 27,174 in 2024, owing to new measures implemented by the Conservative government and enhanced enforcement operations.

The crackdown is expected to raise concerns in the care sector, which has already highlighted how low pay are fuelling a recruiting issue. The sector is also dealing with the impact of rising employer National Insurance.