In a move that will affect Zimbabwean care workers, UK Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has announced that care workers will no longer be recruited from abroad as part of plans to “significantly” reduce net migration.
Under the new policy, care providers in the UK will be required to hire British nationals or extend visas for foreign workers already in the country, as the overseas recruitment route for care workers is being closed.
Speaking on Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips on Sky News, Cooper said the government is shutting down the care worker visa route as part of a broader effort to reduce the number of low-skilled foreign workers by around 50,000 this year. She said:
We’re going to introduce new restrictions on lower-skilled workers, so new visa controls, because we think actually what we should be doing is concentrating on the higher-skilled migration and we should be concentrating on training in the UK.
Also, we will be closing the care worker visa for overseas recruitment.
Under the new policy, Zimbabwean care workers already in the UK may be allowed to renew their visas, but new applications from abroad will be restricted.
The UK is shifting towards requiring graduate-level qualifications for work visas, making it more difficult for lower-skilled workers to qualify.
Cooper said that this change, along with restrictions on care worker visas, will likely lead to a reduction of “up to 50,000 low-skilled worker visas over the course of this year alone”.
However, she declined to give a broader target for how much the government wants to reduce overall net migration, only saying it needs to fall “substantially”.
Cooper added that the previous Conservative government repeatedly set targets they failed to meet, and that her approach is focused on “restoring credibility and trust”. She said:
It’s about preventing this chaotic system where we had overseas recruitment soar while training in the UK was cut and we saw low-skilled migration in particular, hugely go up at the same time as UK residents in work or in training fell. That is a broken system. So that is what we need to change.
UK care providers warn that the policy could worsen workforce shortages, as many rely on foreign workers.
More: Sky News
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