The Home Office granted 275 sponsorship visas to care workers after a ‘false’ application

The Home Office awarded 275 sponsorship certificates to care workers after “false” documents were used to apply, according to a damning report.

An investigation led by former Borders and Immigration Inspector David Neal found the Home Office had “limited knowledge” of the care sector after it was added to the UK’s 2022 shortfall occupations list, allowing more people to come to the country in to fill in the gaps in the Job Offer.

As a result, it created a system that “invited large numbers of low-skilled workers into this country who are at risk of exploitation.”

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The report was published on Tuesday afternoon as MPs completed their work in parliament over the Easter break, as well as other work related to Border Force operations at London City Airport.

During that investigation, Neal highlighted “local, regional and national deficiencies” related to the arrival of private jets, which resulted in Border Patrol personnel not operating high-risk flights.

Figures on the number of high-risk flights flown by officials have been redacted, but Neal said the figure was “shocking” and needed to be addressed “as a matter of urgency.”

Neal was fired by the Home Office last month after he leaked details of the airport report to a newspaper and the department said it had “lost the confidence” of Home Secretary James Cleverly.

But the former inspector did he complained many times The Home Office was too slow to publish his critical reports.

“Completely inadequate”

In Neal’s report on social care and immigration, he criticized the department’s “underestimation of the need for a care worker visa”.

Although the Ministry of Interior predicted that between 6,000 and 40,000 people would pass through this route each year, between February 2022 and October 2023, 146,182 scholarships were awarded.

The report criticized the “inadequacy” of the current regime and said that “the discrepancy between the modest number of compliance officers and the ever-expanding list of licensed sponsors” – where there is one officer for every 1,600 employers – is “wholly inadequate”.

In the example of an employer known only as “company b”, the claim was submitted using forged documents and bank statements in the name of a genuine healthcare provider.

However, although online checks showed that the address they provided showed “no trace” of links to care homes, 275 sponsorship certificates were secured, 181 of which were allocated to staff, “none of whom arrived to take up a real role”.

It took more than two months after the company was granted a sponsorship license for Border Guard officers to raise concerns about people arriving on visas.

Another example is the award of 1,234 certificates to a company that claimed to have only four employees when it received its sponsorship license.

“In these two examples alone, up to 1,500 people may have come to this country and been encouraged by the risk of hardship or destitution to work beyond the terms of their visa,” Neal said.

“Relying on leaflets”

The report also highlighted the difficult conditions faced by some employees covered by the system story from Sky Newsin which a care worker paid an agent in Nigeria £10,000 only to find on arrival in the UK that there was no work for her.

It also said inspectors encountered migrants on care visas working illegally during two of eight inspection visits carried out over three months in 2023.

The report praised the Home Office’s frontline care workers and their awareness of the “serious risks”.

But Neal said: “What worries me most is that the Home Office has no process in place to learn the lessons from this failure and then incorporate them into basic thinking so that they don’t happen again.”

“Solid measures”

The former inspector called for a full review of the visa route, sponsorship licensing and regulatory compliance, as well as an inter-agency agreement to ensure each side knows what it is responsible for.

A Home Office spokesman said it had “already intervened to stop the flow of overseas care workers into the UK where they have no real role to play” and had taken “strong action” against exploitation.

They also insisted that new measures had already been introduced to “reduce the increasing number of visas granted and address serious concerns” about non-compliance, labor exploitation and abuse.

But Labour’s home secretary, Yvette Cooper, branded both Neal reports “scandalous”, saying they “reveal a Conservative government that has lost control of our borders and their security.”