UK’s new visa rules could ban care workers from bringing dependents

By Yash Dubal

In the last year, 30,000 Indian nationals moved to the UK to work as care workers under the health and care worker visa route. Of these, over half (18,000) bought dependents with them.

Dependent visas, which allow the wives, husbands, and children of work visa holders to accompany their partners and parents to Britain, are a human right, I would argue. No family should have to be split up because of arbitrary rules that allow dependents into a country and not others.

The ability of care worker visa holders from India to bring their families with them is one of the selling points of the visa routes and arguably one of the main reasons why there is now an army of Indian carers looking after the UK’s growing population of elderly and infirm.

Indian’s make up the biggest proportion of health and care visa holders, ahead of Nigerians (18,000) and Zimbabweans (17,000).
These care workers are desperately needed. The latest figures from the industry body Skills for Care show that there were more than 150,000 vacancies across the adult social care sector in England in the year ending March 2023, equivalent to 9.9% of roles vacant.

Recruitment in this sector has been challenging for many years and worsened after the UK left the EU and so cut itself off from a pipeline of available labour. Salaries are low, largely because the industry relies on local government funding, which is heavily restricted.

Conditions can be difficult, and hours are long. While there are 30,000 students in the UK currently studying for a career in care, they will take time to graduate and when they do will only make a dent in the vacancy figures.

Meanwhile, the one million unemployed people in the UK, and the 70,000 on sickness benefits look unlikely to fill any of these roles. And the population continues to age, so demand for care services will only increase.

Bearing all this in mind you might think that any measure that allows care workers to fill vacancies will be popular with all stakeholders. And to a degree the care worker visa scheme is.

The government added senior care workers to the shortage occupation list in 2021, followed by care workers in February 2022, in a bid to fill the rising number of vacancies and in the year to June 2023, 77,700 long-term work visas were granted to care workers – a six-fold increase from 12,300 in the year to 2022.

This represented around two-thirds of all 120,300 health and care work visas. Health and care visas now account for two in five of all skilled work visas issued in the UK. The Telegraph recently reported that initially, government estimates assumed only around 5,000 people would apply for the visas.

Care service operators see the visa route as a lifeline.

Sam Monaghan, chief executive of Methodist Homes (MHA) – one of the country’s largest charitable care providers – recently said that without overseas recruitment, vacancies will continue to be unfilled, the quality of care and support for vulnerable people would suffer and care homes ‘may well have to close their doors once again to new residents’.

And of course, in India, the care worker visa continues to be popular.

It is surprising then that recent reports in the UK media revealed that the Home Office (the Government Department in charge of immigration) has put forward plans for foreign care workers with poor qualifications to be blocked from bringing family members to the UK.

Ministers want to tighten the rules for the Health and Care Worker visa amid concerns that the route is being abused.
To put this in context, Britain has a complex relationship with immigration, which it welcomes and facilitates on one hand while certain sections of society rail against it on the other.

This contradiction has been even more apparent in the last year following figures which show net migration is at record levels. Add to this the fact that the UK is now in an election year, and that elements of the ruling Conservative Party are against high immigration, and you can start to understand the care worker visa predicament.

In the run up to next year’s general election, which the Conservatives are currently forecast to lose, the party has pledged to bring net migration down from 606,000 last year, to around 250,000. To do this quickly, it needs to pick low hanging fruit.

Earlier this year, the Home Office announced all foreign students except those doing postgraduate research would be barred from bringing family members to the UK. And now family members of care workers are in the sights.

Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, and Robert Jenrick, the immigration minister, are reported to be keen on reducing legal migration and have lobbied Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to do so. But the Prime Minister has put more focus on tackling illegal migration, knowing that foreign workers grow the economy.

If the plans to stop less qualified care worker visa holders were implemented, they would affect thousands of Indians, some of whom are already in the UK, and others who are planning to apply for a visa and move here.

For those with families who want their family to remain intact, the visa route will no longer be an option and they most likely look to move to a more welcoming country. Others will be faced with the agonising decision of whether to go it alone and leave their loved ones to go and work on the other side of the world. There is a human cost to the decision that politicians will be making.

There is a saying in the UK. Don’t cut your nose off to spite your face. Not only would the ban on dependents have tragic effects for many Indians, it would also be an act of national self-harm on one of the country’s most important sectors, making it even harder for care providers to fulfil the need for their services.

(The author is the Director & a Senior Immigration Associate at A Y & J Solicitors, London, United Kingdom and the views expressed are his own)