Patel, Braverman and Jenrick Immigration Scheme Led to Unexpected and Unregulated Influx of 1.2 Million Foreign Workers

Conservative hardliners on immigration oversaw a large, uncontrolled rise in overseas skilled workers entering Britain while in charge of the Home Office between 2020 and 2024, a report by the House of Commons’ Public Accounts Committee reveals today.

Successive Home Secretaries, Priti Patel and Suella Braverman, and Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick, presided over new visa rules that recruited large numbers of workers without introducing sufficient safeguards.

These changes were extended by Patel in February 2022 to include care home workers following COVID, and continued under Braverman, who succeeded her under both Liz Truss’ and Rishi Sunak’s governments.

Jenrick, a vocal critic of unregulated immigration, served as Immigration Minister from October 2022 to December 2023 – the period when arrivals under the skilled worker scheme peaked, before falling in 2024.

The extension of the scheme to include care workers, introduced by Patel, accounted for 648,100 of the applications.

Chris Philp MP, Shadow Home Secretary, did not respond to questions about the Conservative record but told Byline Times: “Labour’s first year in office has been a disaster. Over 20,000 people have crossed the Channel illegally already this year, the highest ever at this point. If this chaos continues, we’re on track to hit 50,000 by the end of 2025.”

A factual report from the Public Accounts Committee shows that, instead of an anticipated 360,000 arrivals under the scheme, the final number was 1.18 million – including dependents – a figure nearly ten times larger than the estimate of 148,000 migrants arriving by small boats between 2020 and 2024.

Exploitation and Modern Slavery

The report is highly critical of the Home Office’s handling of the scheme. Although applicants were required to obtain sponsorship from businesses, almost none of these businesses were vetted. Each civil servant was reportedly responsible for overseeing 1,600 firms, and 99% of applications were initially approved without scrutiny. In one case, 16 applications were linked to the same address.

As a result, MPs concluded that many of those arriving in the UK were exposed to exploitation. Some had paid large sums to agents in their countries of origin and were in debt on arrival; others had been trafficked. Around 5,000 used the visa route to claim asylum, while others who lost employment simply vanished. Some may have become victims of modern slavery.

The report notes that the Home Office did not monitor whether visa-holders left the UK once their visas expired.

Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, Conservative MP and Chair of the Committee, said: “Our report finds that this speed [to open up new visas] came at a painfully high cost – to the safety of workers from the depredations of labour market abuses, and the integrity of the system from people not following the rules.”

He continued:

There has long been mounting evidence of serious issues with the system, laid bare once again in our inquiry. And yet basic information, such as how many people on skilled worker visas have been modern slavery victims, and whether people leave the UK after their visas expire, seems to still not have been gathered by the Government

Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown

Focus on Labour Exploitation, in its evidence to MPs, said: “Any immigration system which doesn’t proactively include mechanisms which enable workers to report exploitation and ultimately leave an exploitative employer, without jeopardising their employment, accommodation and immigration status, has exploitation baked into its design.”

The new Government is set to abolish the care worker visa scheme at the end of this month due to concerns about exploitation.

Jenrick, meanwhile, continues to present himself as tough on immigration. In a Facebook post last month attacking Reform UK, he alluded to his record in office in 2022.

“Take the NHS. We’re told it would collapse without mass migration. But in 2022, just 3% of visas granted were for nurses and doctors,” he wrote.

He did not mention the hundreds of thousands of visa applications for social care workers from overseas that he presided over in the same year.

A Home Office spokesperson told Byline Times:

“This report affirms again that the previous government’s decision five years ago to relax visa controls on skilled workers helped to drive an unprecedented increase in the UK’s level of net migration, with almost one million people coming here in 2023.

“We have rolled up our sleeves to fix the broken immigration system, suspending the highest total of skilled worker sponsor licenses since records began in 2012, raising the Skilled Worker threshold back to degree level and ending overseas recruitment to the care sector.

“With our Immigration Whitepaper, we will deliver lower net migration, higher skills, backing British workers and repairing the public’s trust.”