Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment her Department has made of the potential merits of extending the length of Tier 2 visas for 18 months due to the covid-19 outbreak.

Where employers wish to continue to employ sponsored migrant workers, those workers can qualify for extensions in the normal way.

To show our appreciation to the health sector we have already extended the visas of key NHS frontline workers, and their families, automatically for one year, where their visa was due to expire before 1 October.

The Government is doing all it can to protect jobs and has announced a range of measures to support sponsored workers in Tier 2. Details are published on Gov.uk at: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/coronavirus-covid-19-immigration-and-borders