A new five-point plan to reduce immigration has been announced by the government, which includes banning care workers from bringing over their families and increasing the minimum salary for a skilled worker visa.
Home Secretary James Cleverly has come under pressure since taking office three weeks ago to show he is taking a hardline on immigration.
Today’s five-point plan – which is “more robust” than any previous government’s stance on migration, according to Mr Cleverly – includes measures on health and care visas, skilled worker visas, family visas, the shortage occupation list and student visas.
The measures are:
• Health and care visas: Overseas care workers will not be able to bring family dependants, to end the “abuse of the health and care visa”. Care firms that want to sponsor people for visa applications will need to be regulated by the Care Quality Commission;
• Skilled worker visa minimum salary change: The threshold for an application will rise to £38,700 – although health and care workers will still be able to earn less before applying for the route;
•Shortage occupation list: The government wants to “scrap cut-price shortage labour from overseas” by reforming the way people working in short-staffed sectors can apply to come to the UK. This will include axing the 20% discount applied to the minimum salary for people looking for a visa for shortage occupations. The types of jobs on the list will also be reviewed and reduced;
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• Family visas: The minimum threshold for a family visa will also be raised to £38,700 to “ensure people only bring dependants whom they can support financially”. Currently, it stands at the 2012 rate of £18,600;
• Student visas: Following the tightening of who can bring in family members on student visas earlier this year, the government will ask the Migration Advisory Committee to review the graduate route “to prevent abuse and protect the integrity and quality of UK higher education”.
Home secretary knows he needs to sound tough on migration
This is an enormously important statement for the new home secretary.
Barely three weeks into the job, he has seen his polling among Conservative members plummet as he faces pressure over legal and illegal migration.
Today he addressed the former.
A rise in the skilled worker salary threshold, a ban on health and care workers bringing dependants to the UK and a scrapping of the shortage occupation list are among the measures announced to curb net migration.
The clamp down is seen as a win for the immigration minister Robert Jenrick, who is understood to have been pushing for a more hardline approach.
Discomfort in the party has been palpable after the net migration figure for 2022 was revised up to 745,000 last month – the 2019 Conservative manifesto pledged to bring down net migration; Boris Johnson talked about cutting the number to 250,000.
Will today’s statement make a difference?
The home secretary says the package, and existing plans to reduce student dependents, will mean more than 300,000 people who came to the UK last year would now not be able to.
But there are still questions – like how different the Immigration salary discount list will actually be from the scrapped shortage occupation list?
It seems likely workers from abroad will still be able to undercut British workers in some sectors, which won’t please right wing MPs.
On the other side, there are of course concerns too over a workforce shortage and a need to fill jobs, not least in healthcare.
Today we saw a significant statement on legal migration, a new treaty with Rwanda could come as soon as tomorrow.
The home secretary knows he needs to sound tough to appeal to his party. This could well be his most significant week yet.
Mr Cleverly claimed these measures – as well as the previously announced measures on students – would mean that 300,000 people who entered the UK last year would not have been able to.
He also re-announced plans to raise the increase of the immigration health surcharge from £624 to £1,035.
He told MPs: “When our country voted to leave the European Union, we voted to take back control of our borders.
“Thanks to this Conservative government, we now have a points-based immigration system through which we control who comes to the UK.
“We prioritise the skills and talent we need to grow our economy and support our NHS – and we have a competitive visa system for globally-mobile talent.”
He added: “Immigration policy must be fair, consistent, legal, and sustainable.”
Asked by Tory MP Damian Green how many care workers are expected to be dissuaded by the removal of family dependents from their visa, Mr Cleverly said it was not estimated that fewer people would be working in the UK health and care sector – hoping domestic supply can fill any gaps.
The home secretary told MPs the plan aims to stop “approximately 120,000 dependants” coming in on health and care visas.
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Yvette Cooper, Labour’s shadow home secretary, said the statement was an admission of “years of total failure” by the government – claiming that Rishi Sunak is “crashing around all over the place” and “reversing policies he introduced”.
She pointed out that Labour had called for the scrapping of the 20% discount to shortage occupation lists previously.
Sky News understands that Labour is not planning to object to any of the measures announced today, if they require a vote in parliament.
UKHospitality, a trade body for the hospitality sector, said the changes would have stopped 95% of the 8,500 visas granted for chefs and managers last year – which would “worsen the shortages hospitality businesses are facing”.
Getir, the grocery delivery app which this month confirmed plans to exit the UK, has an outstanding debt to Tottenham Hotspur Football Club running to millions of pounds.
Sky News understands that Turkey-based Getir, whose three-year training kit sponsorship deal with Spurs expired at the end of the Premier League season on Sunday, owes close to £5m to the club.
News of the outstanding debt comes as Getir tries to access a tranche of agreed funding from major investors Mubadala and G Squared to help facilitate its withdrawal from the UK, Germany and the Netherlands.
It was unclear this weekend whether the delivery app, which means “to bring” in Turkish, has the means to settle its financial obligations to Spurs.
The company once attained a valuation of almost £10bn, but has been forced by its deteriorating finances to retrench back to its home market, in the process axing thousands of jobs.
Its withdrawal from the UK has put about 1,500 jobs at risk, Sky News revealed earlier this month.
Companies such as Getir were big winners during the pandemic, attracting funding at astronomical valuations.
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Its decline highlights the slumping valuations of technology companies once-hailed as the new titans of food retailing.
Many of its rivals have already gone bust, while others have been swallowed up as part of a desperate wave of consolidation.
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Getir itself bought Gorillas in a $1.2bn stock-based deal that closed in December 2022.
Getir and Tottenham Hotspur both declined to comment.
Billionaire Sir Jim Ratcliffe has told Sky News that Britain is ready for a change of government after scolding the Conservatives over their handling of the economy and immigration after Brexit.
While insisting his petrochemicals conglomerate INEOS is apolitical, Sir Jim backed Brexit and spent last weekend with Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer at Manchester United – the football club he now runs as minority owner.
“I’m sure Keir will do a very good job at running the country – I have no questions about that,” Sir Jim said in an exclusive interview.
“There’s no question that the Conservatives have had a good run,” he added. “I think most of the country probably feels it’s time for a change. And I sort of get that, really.”
Sir Jim was a prominent backer of leaving the European Union in the 2016 referendum but now has issues with how Brexit was delivered by Tory prime ministers.
“Brexit sort of unfortunately didn’t turn out as people anticipated because… Brexit was largely about immigration,” Sir Jim said.
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“That was the biggest component of that vote. People were getting fed up with the influx of the city of Southampton coming in every year. I think last year it was two times Southampton.
“I mean, no small island like the UK could cope with vast numbers of people coming into the UK.
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“I mean, it just overburdens the National Health Service, the traffic service, the police, everybody.
“The country was designed for 55 or 60 million people and we’ve got 70 million people and all the services break down as a consequence.
“That’s what Brexit was all about and nobody’s implemented that. They just keep talking about it. But nothing’s been done, which is why I think we’ll finish up with the change of government.”
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has indicated an election is due this year but Monaco-based Sir Jim is unimpressed by the Conservatives’ handling of the economy.
“The UK does need to get a bit sharper on the business front,” he said. “I think the biggest objective for the government is to create growth in the economy.
“There’s two parts of the economy, there’s the services side of the economy and there’s the manufacturing side. And the manufacturing, unfortunately, has been sliding away now for the last 25 years.
“We were very similar in scale to Germany probably 25 years ago.
“But today we’re just a fraction of where Germany is and I think that isn’t healthy for the British economy… particularly when you think the north of England is very manufacturing based, and that talks to things like energy competitiveness, it talks to things like, why do you put an immensely high tax on the North Sea?
“That just disincentivises people from finding hydrocarbons in the North Sea, in energy.
“And what we need is competitive energy. So I mean, in America, in the energy world, in the oil and gas world, they just apply a corporation tax to the oil and gas companies, which is about 30%. And in the UK we’ve got this tax of 75% because we want to kill off the oil and gas companies.
“But if we don’t have competitive energy, we’re not going to have a healthy manufacturing industry. And that just makes no sense to me at all. No.”
‘We’re apolitical’
Asked about INEOS donating to Labour, Sir Jim replied: “We’re apolitical, INEOS.
“We just want a successful manufacturing sector in the UK and we’ve talked to the government about that. It’s pretty clear about our views.”
Sir Jim was keener to talk about the economy and politics than his role at struggling Manchester United, which he bought a 27.7% stake in from the American Glazer family in February – giving him an even higher business profile.
Push for stadium of the North
He is continuing to push for public funds to regenerate Old Trafford and the surrounding areas despite no apparent political support being forthcoming. Sir Keir was hosted at the stadium for a Premier League match last weekend just as heavy rain exposed the fragility of the ageing venue.
“There’s a very good case, in my view, for having a stadium of the North, which would serve the northern part of the country in that arena of football,” Sir Jim said. “If you look at the number of Champions League the North West has won, it’s 10. London has won two.
“And yet everybody from the North has to get down to London to watch a big football match. And there should be one [a large stadium] in the North, in my view.
“But it’s also important for the southern side of Manchester, you know, to regenerate.
“It’s the sort of second capital of the country where the Industrial Revolution began.
“But if you have a regeneration project, you need a nucleus or a regeneration project and having that world-class stadium there, I think would provide the impetus to regenerate that region.”
Marks & Spencer’s website and app has not been working for several hours, with a message telling shoppers “you can’t shop with us right now”.
“We’re working hard to be back online as soon as possible,” it adds.
All the menus and images have disappeared apart from one showing a model in a green jacket.
Customers trying to use the app got the message: “Sorry you can’t shop through the app right now. We’re busy making some planned changes, but will be back soon.”
The site is understood to have been down for several hours.
Replying to one customer on X, the retailer said: “We’re experiencing some technical issues but we are working on it.”
The outage comes a few days before M&S is expected to reveal a big jump in annual profits.
It’s been a successful year for the brand, with strong sales across the business following a turnaround plan that has included store closures and cost cutting.