Recommendation 29

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