The United Kingdom (UK) has officially shut its doors to new international applicants for social care jobs, unveiling a sweeping overhaul of its immigration policy aimed at slashing net migration and restoring public confidence.
According to the 82-page White Paper titled Restoring Control over the Immigration System, released Monday, May 12, the UK government will no longer accept foreign applications for care worker roles, branding the route as “exploited and overused.”
“We will close social care visas to new overseas applications,” the Home Office stated.
“This route has been exploited and overused in ways that damage public confidence and do not support long-term workforce sustainability.”
The new measures are part of what officials describe as the most significant reset of immigration policy in decades. The government says net migration has ballooned out of control, quadrupling between 2019 and 2023, and must be urgently reduced.
For existing foreign care workers already in the UK, the paper notes they will still be able to extend or switch their visas until 2028, while the government works on developing a domestic workforce plan.
“The health and social care sector must move away from reliance on low-wage overseas recruitment,” the document declared. “We will instead support long-term workforce planning and training within the UK.”
Central to the overhaul is a stricter interpretation of what qualifies as “skilled work” under the country’s points-based immigration system.
New rules will raise salary, language, and qualification thresholds while closing what the government describes as “loopholes for low-skilled migration under a skilled label.”
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“We are tightening the definition of skilled work, skilled must mean skilled,” the White Paper insists. “Work that does not meet the bar will not be eligible for a visa, no matter the sector.”
The government is also scrapping the Immigration Salary List, a framework that had allowed employers to pay foreign workers below general wage thresholds.
“We will remove the Immigration Salary List to prevent undercutting of UK wages and to ensure that migration supports, rather than suppresses, the labour market,” it declared.
Employers will now be expected to prove they’ve made efforts to hire locally before recruiting from abroad, a shift that places more responsibility on businesses to invest in domestic talent.
“No employer should be allowed to default to migration. We are rebalancing the system to reward training, not reliance,” the Home Office said.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper described the reforms as urgent and overdue.
“We are acting to bring numbers down and restore control. We must rebuild public trust and end the perception that immigration is a substitute for skills planning,” Cooper said.
Echoing this tough stance, the policy paper closed with a clear message: “We will not allow temporary migration routes to become permanent. Our reforms will restore integrity and ensure immigration works for Britain, not the other way round.”