Industry and union attack plans to ban overseas care worker recruitment

Plans to end overseas recruitment for care workers have been labelled as “cruel” and ministers told the sector would have “collapsed long ago” without foreign staff.

The UK Government has been urged to “reassure overseas workers they’ll be allowed to stay” after Yvette Cooper announced that recruitment from abroad would be closed.

Care England has labelled the change a “crushing blow to an already fragile sector”, while Unison has said that “hostile language” has seen applications for care visas “fall off a cliff”.

Lifeline

Martin Green, Care England’s chief executive accused the Government of “kicking us while we’re already down”.

“For years, the sector has been propping itself up with dwindling resources, rising costs, and mounting vacancies,” he said.

“International recruitment wasn’t a silver bullet, but it was a lifeline. Taking it away now, with no warning, no funding, and no alternative, is not just short-sighted – it’s cruel.”

According to figures released in January 2025, applications to come to the UK on a health and care worker visa fell sharply last year.

Overall there were 63,800 applications between April and December 2024, compared to 299,800 a year earlier.

A ban on overseas care workers bringing family dependants with them to the UK came into force in 2024.

‘Anxious’

Christina McAnea, general secretary of the Unison union said that the “NHS and the care sector would have collapsed long ago without the thousands of workers who’ve come to the UK from overseas”.

“Migrant health and care staff already here will now be understandably anxious about what’s to happen to them. The Government must reassure these overseas workers they’ll be allowed to stay and continue with their indispensable work,” she added.

She also called on the Government to “stop describing care jobs as low skilled” and “get on with making its fair pay agreement a reality”.

The Independent Care Group told the Government it has got it “badly wrong”.

Chairman Mike Padgham said that “we do try to recruit staff from this country, but we simply haven’t been able to get the numbers we need”.

“There are currently around 130,000 vacancies in social care. Overseas recruitment brought in around 185,000 much-needed workers. ”

Ms Cooper said rules around care visas will be changed to “prevent” them being used to “recruit from abroad”, but that companies will still be able to recruit from a pool of thousands of people who came to the UK on care visas for jobs that did not exist.

The Home Secretary told Sky News on Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips that ministers are going to “introduce new restrictions on lower-skilled workers” because “what we should be doing is concentrating on the higher-skilled migration and we should be concentrating on training in the UK”.

“We will be closing the care worker visa for overseas recruitment,” she added.

Under current rules, to qualify for a care worker visa a person must have a certificate of sponsorship from their employer with information about the role they have been offered in the UK.