UK government immigration plan aims to significantly reduce net migration
In May, the UK government published a white paper setting out its plans to redesign the UK’s immigration system to ‘significantly’ reduce net migration. Between June 2021 and June 2023 net migration increased from 254,000 to a record 906,000. The latest estimate in the year to December 2024 is 431,000.
The measures in the white paper include tougher visa requirements, doubling the time before an individual can apply for permanent residence, ending overseas recruitment for the social care sector and reviewing how the right to family life should apply to immigration cases. The Home Office estimates that 98,000 fewer visas would be issued under the new rules, equivalent of about 10% of visa grants in 2024.
The government plans to raise salary thresholds and introduce higher skills standards for graduates and workers. Employers will be required to boost domestic training and partners accompanying workers on the route will need to demonstrate a basic understanding of English. The social care visa, introduced in 2020 to fill staff shortages following the Covid pandemic and Brexit, will be closed to new applicants, largely over concerns about abuse and the exploitation of individual workers.
Robert McNeil is the deputy director of The Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, which provides independent analysis of UK migration. He says that it’s difficult to predict the precise impact of the proposed changes on people and businesses without more information about how exactly they will be implemented. ‘The increase in salary thresholds and the removal of certain middle skilled jobs from the skilled worker route may have impacts, but we’ll be able to tell how it’s going to affect people better when we can actually see what the details are,’ he says.
If individuals expect that they will be eligible to apply for indefinite leave to remain and then suddenly have the rug pulled from under their feet, this would be extremely unfair but possibly not illegal
Nick Rollason
Co-Chair of the IBA’s Immigration and Nationality Committee
Nick Rollason, the head of immigration at Kingsley Napley and Co-Chair of the IBA’s Immigration and Nationality Committee, says the new restrictions would make it more complicated and expensive for businesses to sponsor overseas employees, particularly in sectors such as construction and hospitality. He says scrapping social care visas on the grounds of abuse threatens a sector already at risk from major staff vacancies. ‘The issues with the visa were not just about rogue employers abusing the visa route. The failure of the Home Office to provide adequate oversight of what was clearly a higher-risk route until far too late in the day also contributed. That failure and the closure of the route now means care homes being starved of vital staff.’
The government says it is going to drive domestic recruitment in the sector by establishing Fair Pay Agreements to empower social care workers to negotiate better pay and working conditions. The Home Office did not reply to requests from Global Insight for comment.
Matthew Wills, a partner at Laura Devine Immigration, says that if the government wants to end its reliance on overseas workers in the social care sector it needs to devise a ‘definite plan’ to ensure that any workers who already have the right to work have the appropriate skills and training. ‘I haven’t seen any proposals of that nature which I think is of some concern,’ he says.
In one of its most controversial proposals, the UK government has signalled it will change the period before migrants can apply for permanent residence from five to ten years. Under the plans, the waiting time could be reduced through an ‘earned settlement’ system, under which people would be awarded points based on their contribution to the UK ‘economy and society’. A ten-year route to settlement would make the UK more restrictive than most other high-income countries in Europe where the standard route to settlement is five years.
Rollason says his clients are ‘really panicking’ about the increase in the settlement period from five to ten years because of uncertainties about whether the extension will apply to migrants already living in the UK and the potential impact it may have on family life and integration. ‘If individuals are not able to obtain indefinite leave to remain, they will need to continue to be sponsored by their employers with significant additional costs to pay for extensions, the Immigration Health Surcharge and with many negative consequences for families including children not being able to leave home or go to university on an equal footing to locals,’ he says.
Potential legal challenges against the government to updated rules by people who had a reasonable expectation of settlement after five years would be difficult, says Rollason, because the Home Office has made it clear that immigration rules can change any time following successful legal challenges against the retrospective application of rules previously. ‘If individuals expect that they will be eligible to apply for indefinite leave to remain and then suddenly have the rug pulled from under their feet, this would be extremely unfair but possibly not illegal,’ he says.
The Migration Observatory says that a ten-year route to settlement would likely have a small impact on migration numbers but would generate increased revenue for the Home Office because migrants would have to pay more ongoing immigration fees.
Other plans for change signalled in the white paper include proposals to introduce legislation to ‘clarify’ how the right to family life in European human rights law should apply to immigration cases. The white paper also lays out plans to restrict people on visas from applying for asylum and extend a refugee pilot to allow a limited pool of UNHCR recognised refugees to apply for employment via existing sponsored worker routes. Approximately 10% of all migrants to the UK were asylum seekers in 2024.
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