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Sir Keir Starmer’s government has signalled it wants to curb overseas hiring by technology and engineering companies after it asked its independent advisers on migration to review the sectors’ reliance on skilled worker visas.
Yvette Cooper on Wednesday asked the Migration Advisory Committee to investigate which roles in tech and engineering were suffering shortages, whether pay, training and conditions explained any shortfalls, and how employers had sought to adapt other than by hiring from abroad.
While the government was “very grateful for the contribution that people from all over the world make to our economy . . . the system needs to be managed and controlled”, the home secretary wrote in a letter to the MAC.
High levels of international recruitment reflected weaknesses and persistent skills shortages in the UK labour market, and “the system as it exists is not operating in the national interest”, Cooper added.
Cooper asked the MAC to report within nine months on how the immigration system “could be used more effectively” to spur employers to focus on recruitment from the domestic workforce. She noted that this could include changes to salary thresholds that are lower for some key roles seeing shortages at present.
Cooper’s focus on recruitment in two relatively well-paid, highly skilled areas is a departure from the previous Conservative government’s post-Brexit approach to immigration policy, which stopped employers sponsoring visas for low-skilled work but put few limits on high earners.
Last year, the Tories announced sharp increases in salary thresholds for skilled workers, who must now generally earn at least the median for their occupation, in a bid to slash immigration from a recent record of 745,000.
Their main clampdown was on the care sector, however, where overseas hiring had surged, but a ban on migrant workers bringing family members has led to a sharp drop in the number of new arrivals.
Labour has pledged to cut immigration further — including when it comes through work-related routes — and wants to forge closer links between the MAC and its newly created Skills England body to create a pipeline of domestic talent to fill jobs where skills have perennially been in short supply.
Hiring in the tech sector accounts for about one in six of all skilled worker visas, with programmer and IT business analysts in particularly high demand, according to Home Office figures.
Engineers account for fewer visas, but manufacturers say there are key roles they find especially difficult to fill within the UK, and they have lobbied hard for visa rules to be relaxed for some lower-skilled technicians.
A total of 67,703 skilled worker visas were issued by the Home Office in the year to March 2024, down 2 per cent compared with the previous year.
Verity Davidge, director of policy at manufacturers’ group Make UK, said the MAC’s review would be “a great cause of concern” for a sector with 62,000 live vacancies and no quick way in the short term to train replacements for experienced workers who were retiring.
“We really need a new government to help open up the talent pool. The fear is we could see a tightening of restrictions,” she said.
Cooper said the MAC could consider “a wide range of options”, including rules tailored to different regions or occupations, but that “these must be balanced against the risks of undercutting the wages of British workers and of overcomplicating the system”.
Nimmi Patel, head of skills, talent and diversity at TechUK, said the trade body welcomed the focus on boosting the domestic pipeline of talent.
But she added that it would present evidence to the MAC on persistent skills shortages that affected data centres, cyber security, telecoms and spectrum policy in particular, and make the case that migrants were “an addition to homegrown skills . . . that is really nice to have”.
Data visualisation by Amy Borrett
