The UK government’s crackdown on visas for overseas workers could put overstretched care homes under threat of closure, with tens of thousands fewer staff coming to the country.
Applications for Britain’s health and care worker visa are at a record low after care workers were prevented from bringing children and other dependants with them in a bid to curb climbing migration numbers.
Between April 2023 to March 2024, when the new rules came in, there were 129,000 applicants, but that plummeted to just 26,000 in the year to March 2025, according to government figures.
The revelation comes as care homes struggle to retain staff, with more than 100,000 vacancies across England last year – a rate of 8% and three times the national average.
Age UK warned that overseas recruits were “keeping many services afloat” and some care homes could be forced to shut if they could not find alternatives, piling more pressure on NHS hospitals.
New rules, brought in by the Labour government in March 2025, mean overseas workers will only get a visa if they earn over £25,000 a year.
This will impact healthcare assistants, who support nurses by carrying out clinical tasks such as blood tests, 13 per cent of whom are from overseas.
Age UK’s Charity Director, Caroline Abrahams, said that social care staff coming here from abroad have kept many services afloat over the last few years, when otherwise they would have struggled because of too many vacancies.
Saffron Cordery, interim chief executive of NHS Providers, told The Independent that curbs on visas make it harder for care services to recruit staff when demand is only growing.
A report from Skills for Care, which collects employment data for social care providers, said that in April to June last year, an estimated 8,000 international recruits were joining the independent sector in England – down from an average of 26,000 per quarter the year before.
Nuffield Trust researcher Nina Hemmings told The Independent that March 2025 saw the lowest number of monthly applicants to the UK’s health and care worker scheme since the data was first published and had decreased by 70 per cent since March 2024.
Lib Dem MP Layla Moran, chair of the Health and Social Care Committee, confirmed that amongst the many problems plaguing the care system and providers are the workforce issues of recruitment and retention, which has led to a very high vacancy rate of over 8%, three times the national average.
Martin Green, chief executive for Care England, which represents care homes across the UK, said the government’s changes were having a “significant impact” on overseas recruitment “but they have not got a strategic and coherent approach to developing the UK workforce”.
