Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment the Government has made of the potential merits of introducing a visa for jobseekers in higher-skilled roles where employers have demonstrated a difficulty in finding suitable candidates.

Since 2010, we have focused on admitting workers who already have a skilled job offer from a sponsoring employer under our Tier 2 visa system, rather than admitting people to look for work. Previous visa routes for jobseekers resulted in many filling low-skilled jobs or remaining unemployed, and were also heavily abused.

There were 56,051 Tier 2 skilled work visa applications in the year ending March 2017, similar to the level in the previous year. This suggests employers are not experiencing difficulties recruiting candidates directly from overseas for highly skilled roles. Tier 2 ensures that workers are only admitted where employers have demonstrated that a role cannot be filled from the resident labour market. This requirement is waived for recognised shortage occupations, such as doctors in emergency medicine, engineers in the oil and gas industry, and cyber security specialists.