Government to end care worker recruitment from abroad later this year

The government will end the recruitment of care workers from abroad later this year, home secretary Yvette Cooper announced today.

Cooper told the BBC’s Laura Kuennsberg that social care providers would no longer be able to recruit staff from abroad via health and care visas when the policy came into force.

Instead, they would need to draw on the domestic labour force, people on other immigration visas or the pool of overseas staff who had been left without a job after losing visa sponsorship.

The news has sparked alarm from social care bodies, who said international recruitment had been a “lifeline” for the sector in recent years and that the decision risked “extreme workforce shortages” and harm to disabled and older people.

Positive impact of sharp rise in overseas recruitment

In 2021, the then government relaxed immigration rules to allow providers to recruit senior care workers on the health and care visa, on the basis that they were a shortage occupation, extending this to all care workers the following year.

This enabled a sharp rise in international recruitment into social care from 2022-24 that drove a reduction in vacancy levels, from a record high of 164,000, in 2022, to 131,000 in 2024, and reduced turnover rates to their lowest level in a decade.

International recruits were also significantly less likely to take days off sick and more likely to have met the care certificate standards, which state basic expectations of care workers, than British staff, according to Skills for Care research.

Drop in number of new international staff

However, since 2024, the level of overseas recruitment has plummeted on the back of immigration restrictions introduced by the Conservatives, under which staff were prevented from bringing in family members with them when taking up jobs in the UK.

The Labour government tightened the system further last month, by preventing English providers from recruiting from abroad unless they had first tried to fill roles with overseas staff left without work because their employers had had their visa sponsorship licences revoked.

It also raised the minimum salary required for an overseas recruit to £25,000, or £12.82 an hour, above the national living wage (£12.21) that many care staff are paid.

But in its immigration white paper, published tomorrow, the government will go further still and end overseas recruitment of care staff, as part of reforms to reserve skilled worker visas for graduate-level jobs in most cases.

For all other roles, recruitment from abroad would be “strictly time-limited”, granted only on the basis of strong evidence of shortages in critical roles and where employers were committed to increasing their numbers of domestic staff.

End to international recruitment into care sector

In her appearance on Sunday with Laura Kuennsberg, Cooper said: “We’re going to change those rules this year to prevent the care worker visa from being used to recruit from abroad,” the home secretary said.

She said that instead, employers would have to rely on staff from the following groups:

• The domestic labour force;
• Existing staff on health and care visas, whose visas will continue to be extendable;
• People from abroad who are in the UK on other immigration routes, such as student, graduate or family visas;
• The pool of workers brought left without a job because their employer’s sponsorship had been cancelled, including in cases of exploitation.

Requirement to recruit from pool of displaced staff

Cooper told Kuennsberg: “There’s more than 10,000 people who came on a care visa where the sponsorship visa was cancelled, effectively they came to jobs that weren’t effectively here or were not of the proper standard.

“They are here and care companies should be recruiting from that pool of people, rather than recruiting from abroad. So we are closing recruitment from abroad.”

She said that this policy would be introduced alongside the planned fair pay agreement for adult social care. Under this, an Adult Social Care Negotiating Body would be set up to set pay and conditions for the sector, with the intent being that this will drive up salaries and make the sector more attractive for people from the UK.

Warning of ‘extreme workforce shortages’

However, provider leaders warned that the fair pay agreement was years away from implementation and the government had not allocated any funding to implementing it.

In the meantime, withdrawing the option of overseas recruitment risked “extreme workforce shortages” and harm to people needing care and support, said the Homecare Association.

Its chief executive, Jane Townson, added: “International recruitment is a lifeline for the home care sector, enabling us to provide vital support to older and disabled people in their own homes. Care providers are already struggling to recruit within the UK.

“We are deeply concerned the government has not properly considered what will happen to the millions of people who depend on care at home to live safely and independently.”

‘A crushing blow to an already fragile sector’

For fellow provider representative body Care England, chief executive Martin Green described the decision as “a crushing blow to an already fragile sector”.

Among other longstanding pressures, services are dealing with the impact of last month’s rise in employer national insurance contributions.

This will cost English independent adult social care providers an extra £2.8bn in 2025-26, according to think-tank the Nuffield Trust, with sector bodies warning that councils are not fully covering the increased costs for services they commission.

“For years, the sector has been propping itself up with dwindling resources, rising costs and mounting vacancies,” Green added.

“International recruitment wasn’t a silver bullet, but it was a lifeline. Taking it away now, with no warning, no funding, and no alternative, is not just short-sighted – it’s cruel.”