‘Shocking’ system for awarding care worker visas leaves people at risk of exploitation, inspection report says
A damning inspection report has found multiple failures in the Home Office’s system for awarding care worker visas, including 275 granted to a care home that did not exist.
The report found the whole regime of allowing care homes to sponsor visas to bring in workers from overseas was “shocking” in its implementation, and the net effect was “a system that invited large numbers of low-skilled workers to this country who are at risk from exploitation”.
The report was produced by David Neal, who was sacked as the chief inspector of borders and immigration last month after he was embroiled in a row with the government over concerns he was raising about the Home Office.
The Home Office published two outstanding reports from Neal on Tuesday, including the scathing verdict on its sponsor licensing regime for care worker visas.
Neal’s report sets out “the consequences of the Home Office’s limited understanding of the social care sector, its underestimation of demand for the care worker visa, the inappropriateness of its sponsor licensing regime for low-skilled roles, and the mismatch between its meagre complement of compliance officers and ever-expanding register of licensed sponsors”.
The report said it was inappropriate to have copied a scheme that worked for largely compliant sectors and applied it to a high-risk area, saying that “migration into an atomised and poorly paid sector is miles away from the recruitment of highly skilled workers being sponsored by multinational”.
It concluded this “should have been obvious to Home Office policymakers” and highlighted that there was just one compliance officer for every 1,600 employers licensed to sponsor migrant workers, with a huge rush of more than 132,000 visas granted – in contrast to the estimate of 6,000 to 40,000 forecast to apply.
Neal drew attention to the case of 275 certificates of sponsorship granted to a care home that did not exist, and 1,234 certificates granted to a company that stated it had only four employees when given a licence.“In just these two examples, up to 1,500 people could have arrived in this country and been encouraged by a risk of hardship or destitution to work outside the conditions of their visa,” the report said.
