Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, with reference to the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration’s (ICIBI) report entitled An inspection of the immigration system as it relates to the agricultural sector, what assessment she has made of the implications for her policies of the finding which indicated that for the seasonal worker visa schemes fewer than 97 per cent of sponsored workers who had obtained visas left the UK at the end of their permitted stay in 2021.

As per our response in the report, we assessed the data set that the ICIBI were drawing on to be incomplete. Whilst there were indications of an instance of a Sponsor not meeting the 97% metric, there is further work to corroborate this with the Providers themselves. This can be found in paragraph 8.48 of the published report (An inspection of the immigration system as it relates to the agricultural sector May to August 2022 - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)).

The assessment of performance metrics of the seasonal worker labour providers is an ongoing rolling process, but where we do find any that have been breached, robust action will be taken against their licence to operate.