Every government since 2008 has told us the same thing about work visas: this time, immigration is under control. Boris Johnson’s post-Brexit points-based system promised it again in 2020. Five years on, the figures alone tell you how well that promise has been kept.
In 2019–20, Britain issued around 120,000 work visas. By 2023 that had rocketed to over 600,000, the highest total in modern British history, before easing to roughly 400,000 in 2024. Ministers will point to that fall and call it progress. It isn’t. The system still runs at more than double its pre-Brexit rate: skill thresholds were cut to A-level equivalent, salary floors lowered, the Resident Labour Market Test abolished, and employers handed free rein to recruit from anywhere in the world.
Much of the increase runs through a single route. The Health and Care Worker visa, waved through in 2020 as an emergency pandemic measure, has now issued nearly 710,000 grants, more than half of all work visas combined. Nevertheless, the failures and mistakes made regarding the health and care visa apply generally to the work visa. An emergency fix has become the permanent business model for recruiting NHS and care staff, propping up a workforce Britain has spent decades failing to train enough of its own people to fill. The Home Office effectively licences ‘trusted employers’ to recruit, often with the help of local recruitment agencies, unlimited numbers of numbers of workers they claim to need. Such a process is wide open to abuse and often is.
The number that should worry ministers most, as it has the public, is not just how many workers came but also who came with them. In 2023, for the first time on record, dependants outnumbered the workers themselves: roughly 260,000 family members against 225,000 main applicants, a ratio of 1.16 dependants for every worker. A route sold to the public as filling job vacancies, in practice, became a family-settlement channel in all but name.
The countries now supplying these visas have narrowed sharply too. India, Nigeria, Pakistan and the Philippines now dominate, with India alone accounting for over 1.4 million work visas since 2005, including more than 160,000 skilled-worker grants in 2023 alone. That is not diversity. It is concentration risk, leaving British hospitals, care homes and universities exposed to labour-market shocks in a handful of countries thousands of miles away.
Here is the part ministers would rather you didn’t notice. Almost everyone admitted on these routes can apply to settle after five years, so the 2020–2024 “Boriswave” cohorts already guarantee a wave of permanent settlement whatever the government does next. Migration Watch’s central estimate is around 384,000 grants of Indefinite Leave to Remain between 2025 and 2029 from these cohorts alone, potentially exceeding 600,000 in total: a city the size of Glasgow added permanently to the British population within a decade, and the decision has already been made.
This is the trick behind every claim that migration is “coming down”. Visa numbers can fall for a year or two while settlement and citizenship totals keep climbing, because today’s totals are simply yesterday’s decisions catching up. Ministers cannot have it both ways: either they act on the routes still open, or they accept that the promise to bring numbers down was empty.
Our report sets out what actually fixing this would require: firm annual caps on the Skilled Worker and Health and Care routes; real restrictions on dependants, if indeed they should come
at all; a genuine return to higher skill and salary thresholds; and a revived Resident Labour Market Test that forces employers to look at home first. None of this is complicated. What has been missing for twenty years is not the policy. It is the political will to design limits in, rather than promise them after the fact.
