Statement of Changes in Immigration Rules

Debate between Lord Oates and Lord Allan of Hallam

Wednesday 1st May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Oates (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Work Rights Centre for its briefing and support, and for all its efforts to protect working people from exploitation. I am also grateful to the Kenyan Nurses and Midwives Association UK, the Refugee, Asylum and Migration Policy project, the Cavendish Coalition, and the Recruitment and Employment Confederation for their briefing.

Noble Lords will not be surprised to learn that my remarks tonight will be heavily critical of the Government so, before I embark on them—and as I may not have another chance before change comes at the next election —I put on record my personal respect for the noble Lord, Lord Sharpe of Epsom, and my thanks to him for his rapid and humane responses to the immigration issues I have frequently raised with him.

This regret Motion concerns the Government’s Statement of Changes in Immigration Rules on 19 February, which came into effect on 11 March. The Statement implements part of the announcements made by the Home Secretary on 4 December 2023. This includes preventing overseas care workers from bringing their dependants to the UK, and a requirement that care providers in England that wish to sponsor migrant workers are registered with the Care Quality Commission. Regrettably, these changes will do little to combat exploitation in the care sector. Arguably, they will encourage and entrench it.

Before I go into further detail on this point, I express particular regret at the notion that carers arriving in the UK will no longer be able to bring their children with them. This troubles me deeply. We are asking care workers to care for our loved ones, but we are denying them the right to do the same in respect of their own children and partners. The Government have stated that they do not expect a significant reduction in the demand for care roles because of this change. Given the Government’s failure to provide an impact assessment to accompany these changes, a fact highlighted by the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, neither we nor the Government can know this. Only time will tell, but I will certainly be surprised if the changes do not lead to a fall in the experience and quality of care workers who wish to come to the United Kingdom.

This concern appears validated by the work of two organisations, the Women’s Coalition of Zimbabwe and the Southern Africa Human Rights Defenders Network, which support over 100 women healthcare workers who received their work permits before the changes took place and therefore have a right to have their children join them. However, they are repeatedly being refused visas for their children. The distress and anxiety of leaving a child behind are overwhelming, and many of these women choose to return home rather than continue to be parted from their children. One of these women describes the pain of separation from her teenage son as follows:

“The separation has strained the emotional bond between us. I am not in his life during this critical teenage stage. It’s devastating not to be in the daily life of your child. It is having a negative impact on his future. In truth I am now a depressed caregiver. This in turn affects my work as well. A happy carer makes happy clients”.


These women are exceptional people. Some are graduates and university lecturers, and many have medical qualifications —they are nurses, midwives and senior nurses. They have skills and experience that our country will not benefit from if we enforce the separation of care workers from their children and partners.

However, regardless of whether the number of care workers or the level of their experience falls or stays the same, we should ask ourselves whether this change is morally right. What sort of country are we if we exploit the contribution that care workers make to the well-being of our communities but implement rules that separate them from their communities and their children, across continents and against their will? We need to think carefully about this issue and how we ourselves would feel were such a situation to affect us and our families.

Separating parents from their children is terrible in itself, but there are other consequences that the ban on dependants is likely to have. The Work Rights Centre points out that the ban, which includes a ban on partners, is likely to do two things: first, to force carers into acquiescent exploitative working conditions and, secondly, to make it more likely that carers will be forced into destitution. This is because the income of partners is one of the only lifelines that migrant care workers have to support themselves when exiting an exploitative workplace. It is also often a vital source of income, given the cost of living pressures in the UK.

Turning to the first issue, migrant care workers are vulnerable because their visas rely on employer sponsorship. The latest intelligence report from the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority, the government agency tasked with tackling exploitation, noted that the most common vulnerability among potential victims of forced and compulsory labour in the UK was the potential victim being tied into a visa sponsorship arrangement with an employer. The report states:

“This on occasions led to workers being forced to work for the employer even if the conditions were unacceptable and the employer using the threat of cancelling the sponsorship if the worker complained”.


If sponsorship is revoked, workers have only 60 days to find another registered sponsor before becoming undocumented. Two months’ time is simply not enough time; not only do workers have to find a new employer who has a sponsor licence in that period but they also have to secure confirmation of a job offer and they need to submit new visa applications for themselves and any family members. To make matters more difficult, there is no central job search portal to match migrant workers in this situation with legitimate employers who have a sponsor licence.

With regard to the second issue, migrant care workers and their partners arriving in the UK depend on the money that they are able to earn while working in the sector; they do not have recourse to public funds and, in social care, they are paid at notoriously low rates. Many migrant workers opt for the additional 20 hours a week that is permitted under the health and care work visa in order to supplement their income, and many often need their partner’s income to meet the cost of living. A central concern here is that, without addressing the vulnerability that underlies work sponsorship or tackling the issues of low pay in the sector, banning migrant care workers from bringing their partners to the UK will do little but increase cost of living pressures and financially disincentivise people from reporting exploitation. That is before we consider whether it is right that those emigrating to the UK to work in our social care sector and make a valuable contribution to our society should be denied the ability to do so with their loved ones by their side.

I come now to the new CQC registration requirement, designed to combat the increasing and disturbing evidence of exploitation of sponsored workers in the care sector. Regrettably, the evidence suggests that these changes are unlikely to achieve this important objective. There have been recent media reports concerning sponsor licences being issued by the Home Office to companies purporting to provide care but with a very limited corporate history or track record of actually doing so. Some of these companies were successfully registered with the CQC before being given sponsor licences, although they had never been subject to CQC inspection. This has resulted in sponsored workers arriving in the UK to find that there is no work and being forced into precarious situations by rogue actors to whom they are often indebted.

These revelations suggest that merely being registered with the CQC is not a sufficient measure to prevent exploitation. Stakeholders have identified a number of loopholes—for example, that care providers can register with the CQC but then make this registration dormant. The provider is not then subject to inspection or other regulation by the CQC, and its dormant status is not listed on the CQC’s website. Stakeholders have expressed concerns that these dormant providers are obtaining sponsor licences.

These loopholes give rise to a number of questions, which I hope the Minister can answer this evening. First, why do the Government not impose a requirement that care providers wishing to sponsor migrant workers should either have been subject to inspection in the recent past or must be inspected before a licence to sponsor is issued? Secondly, have the Government considered imposing a minimum inspection rating as a requirement before care providers are eligible to sponsor? Thirdly, what measures do the Government intend to put in place to assess the impact of these changes so that the Home Office can properly assess whether they are delivering on the objective of ending care worker exploitation?

The truth is that this measure, while it has the veneer of action against exploitation, is without any real teeth to ensure that that exploitation is actually stamped out. The CQC has not been provided with new powers to investigate labour exploitation within the care workforce. Indeed, that is not its responsibility. The CQC is clear that its focus is on the quality of care that is delivered, not on labour exploitation. The CQC obviously has a vital role to play in regulating the social care sector in England, but the Home Office cannot abdicate its responsibility to properly audit employers before and after sponsor licences are given out.

On this note, the report of the former Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration into the immigration system and its role in the care sector is deeply concerning. It highlighted, among other things, the inappropriateness of the sponsor licensing regime for the sector and the mismatch between the Home Office’s meagre complement of compliance officers and the ever-expanding register of licensed sponsors. Senior Home Office staff and managers told the inspector’s team that Home Office guidance is not sufficiently stringent to enable refusals of sponsor licence applications, even where significant concerns exist.

In light of these findings, will the Minister outline what improvements have been made to empower sponsor compliance case workers to refuse the licence applications of abusive employers at the earliest possible stage? If the department cannot instigate a greater number of sponsor inspections, how will it change guidance so that it does not remain flexible and enabling for exploitative sponsors? How is the Home Office protecting migrant workers who, as a result of enforcement action against sponsors, are left destitute and indebted? These are key questions, the answers to which are extremely unclear.

I close by paying heartfelt tribute to all those who come to this country to work in our health and care sectors in difficult circumstances and often on low pay. They make an immeasurable contribution to our country and the well-being of our communities. I hope, therefore, that the Government will reconsider their approach so that we can ensure that they are all protected from exploitation, are able to have a decent standard of living and are afforded the rights to family life that we would expect for ourselves. I beg to move.

[Lord Allan of Hallam (LD)]

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Oates has done us all a favour by ensuring that we are able to have this debate today—a debate which, as he has pointed out to us, involves some of the most vulnerable people coming to this country in order to fill a need that we have. It is that need that has brought me here to make a contribution today.

The debate is particularly timely, given that we had the Government earlier today making a Statement in which they seemed incredibly pleased with themselves because there had been a reduction of over 20% in the number of health and social care visas that were issued during the first three months of the year. That reduction with which the Government are so inordinately pleased is an area of significant concern for those of us who worry about the provision of health and social care services.

There are three possible hypotheses for why we saw that reduction. The first is that the need for health and social care workers was only temporary—that we have now filled all the jobs and therefore no longer need those migrant workers. That seems quite a stretch to me. The second is that the reduction represents the fact that some of the fraud and abuse in the system has been squeezed out—those visas were not actually necessary, so now the new processes have squeezed them out. I am sure that that is what the Government hope is happening. The third is that there continue actually to be significant shortages but somehow we have managed to contrive through these changes to change the system such that we are putting people off, for the very good reasons that my noble friend described —for example, there are people who simply will not come now, even though we desperately need them, because they cannot bring their family members with them.

If that latter scenario is true then we are storing up trouble. We can imagine that we will be back here in six months’ time, having to make changes again because our health and social care system is crying out for those workers. That kind of yo-yo effect does a disservice both to the health and social care system and to our reputation. We are perhaps a little imperial in thinking that people out there think of the UK as the only option; they have a lot of options. As long as the UK presents a good option, people from countries will come here. However, if we are yo-yoing—saying that we want them today but not tomorrow, and making it easy today but difficult tomorrow—then people will explore other options. When we issue the call for help because we need it, fewer people will answer. From a health and social care point of view, this is extremely concerning.

I would be interested to hear from the Minister what mix of those scenarios he thinks is correct: that we have put people off who we actually need; that we do not need them any more; or that there was just a lot of fraud in the system, and we have now squeezed that out and therefore everything is fine and at a steady state.