Source · Select Committees · Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 29
29
Accepted
Home Office identified care worker exploitation and strengthened compliance activities in response.
Conclusion
After the route’s expansion to include care workers in 2022, the Home Office began to identify concerns with the use of the route, including intelligence referrals from Border Force that people arriving in the UK with a Health and Care Worker visa didn’t speak English or were not aware where they were going.78 In response, the Home Office strengthened its compliance activity. For example, in 2023, it introduced a Risk Hub to centralise risk identification and safeguarding and more rigorously applied checks to test that vacancies are genuine.79 It has also worked closely with DHSC to tackle exploitation in the care sector, such as introducing the requirement for sponsors to be registered with the Care Quality Commission, although it acknowledged that this focused more on patient care than employment regulation issues.80
Government Response Summary
The government agrees to continuously update sector-specific risk assessments, utilise digital tools for risk alerts, form a dedicated unit for salary and employment checks, and introduce new tools by Autumn 2025 to improve checks on sponsor personnel and enhance compliance.
Government Response
Accepted
HM Government
Accepted
5.1 The government agrees with the Committee’s recommendation. Target implementation date: March 2027 5.2 The department continuously updates sector-specific risk assessments using emerging data to guide caseworkers. A digital tool alerts users to risks linked to occupations which are assessed to be below degree level on the Temporary Shortage List. The Home Office routinely use the Salary and Employment Checker for sponsorship cases and are forming a dedicated unit to scale this work, leveraging HMRC data. Planned improvements will enable bulk processing. Additional tools are being tested to surface organisational data, map sponsor structures, and enhance compliance. A new tool in Autumn 2025 will improve checks on key sponsor personnel using data from Companies House and HMRC.