LONDON, England — The United Kingdom will no longer allow care workers to be recruited from overseas as part of a sweeping crackdown on lower-skilled immigration, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper announced on Sunday, May 11, 2025.
In a wide-ranging interview on the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, Cooper said it was “time to end that care worker recruitment from abroad,” adding that the government would introduce measures this year requiring employers to hire British workers or extend visas only for care workers already in the country.
The announcement comes ahead of the publication of the government’s long-awaited immigration White Paper, expected to be unveiled on Monday, May 12, 2025.
The new rules are aimed at cutting net migration and are projected to result in up to 50,000 fewer lower-skilled and care worker visas over the next 12 months.
Net migration to the UK reached a record 906,000 in the year ending June 2023 and stood at 728,000 last year, despite repeated pledges by successive governments to reduce the figure.
The latest moves are part of Labour’s broader effort to overhaul the country’s migration system without setting specific numerical targets.
Cooper said the government is committed to a “substantial reduction in net migration” but warned that setting fixed caps “undermines the credibility of anything that governments do.”
The threshold for skilled visas will also be raised from A-level to graduate level qualifications, and the government will reduce the number of occupations eligible for temporary shortage visas, currently known as the Immigration Salary List.
This list allows employers to pay overseas workers 80% of the market rate for roles deemed in short supply, such as carpenters, designers, and pharmaceutical technicians.
Cooper also announced plans to introduce mandatory training commitments for employers to encourage more domestic workforce participation.
“We need to get people who are not working back into the labour market here in the UK,” she said.
The new care sector rules follow earlier restrictions introduced last year, including a ban on care workers bringing dependants and requirements for care firms to demonstrate efforts to recruit from within the UK before turning to overseas applicants.
Applications for Health and Care Worker visas have since dropped sharply, from a peak of 18,300 in August 2023 to just 1,700 in April 2025.
The Labour government will now require care firms to hire either from the domestic labour pool or from among the more than 10,000 overseas care workers already in the UK who arrived on visas for jobs that failed to materialise.
As part of efforts to improve domestic recruitment, Cooper said the government would introduce a “new fair pay agreement for care workers,” to make jobs in the sector more attractive to UK residents.
The opposition Conservative Party criticised the measures as insufficient.
Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp said the government’s response was “too little” and reiterated his party’s demand for an annual cap on migration.
Philp said the Conservatives would push for a parliamentary vote on the proposal this week.
“We’re working on the detail to specify that number,” he said, suggesting the cap would reduce migration by significantly more than Labour’s estimate of 50,000.
Meanwhile, care sector leaders voiced concerns that the changes would worsen already dire staffing shortages.
Nadra Ahmed, Executive Chairman of the National Care Association, said that although providers prefer to hire locally, the domestic workforce “is just not available,” warning that the new restrictions would exacerbate an already “challenging scenario.”
Liberal Democrat social care spokesperson Helen Morgan described the government’s approach as “tinkering around the edges,” and urged Labour to present a robust plan for pay, recruitment, and career progression in the sector.
The crackdown also comes in the wake of strong local election gains by the right-wing Reform UK party, which claimed credit for the policy shift.
Reform leader Nigel Farage said Labour’s plans were “doomed to fail,” asserting that immigration policy must focus not just on numbers, “but who comes in and if they can assimilate.”
