United Kingdom Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, has announced plans to end the recruitment of care workers from abroad as part of efforts to sharply reduce net migration.

Cooper made this disclosure while speaking on Sky News’ Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillihe.

She said the government will close the care worker visa route, aiming to cut the number of low-skilled foreign workers by around 50,000 this year.

“We’re going to introduce new restrictions on lower-skilled workers, so new visa controls, because we think actually what we should be doing is concentrating on the higher-skilled migration and we should be concentrating on training in the UK.

“Also, we will be closing the care worker visa for overseas recruitment,” Cooper said.

The Immigration White Paper, set to be published this week, will outline the government’s planned reforms in greater detail.

In advance of its release, ministers have already revealed that the skilled worker visa requirements will be tightened, including a new graduate qualification requirement and a higher minimum salary threshold.

The Home Secretary told Trevor Phillips that the new immigration measures — including limits on care worker visas — are expected to cut the number of low-skilled worker visas by up to 50,000 this year.

However, Ms Cooper declined to specify a broader target for reducing net migration, stating only that it needs to decrease “substantially.”

Cooper criticized the Conservatives for consistently setting unattainable targets, stating that her plan focuses on “restoring credibility and trust.”

“It’s about preventing this chaotic system where we had overseas recruitment soar while training in the UK was cut and we saw low-skilled migration in particular, hugely go up at the same time as UK residents in work or in training fell. That is a broken system. So that is what we need to change,” she said.

Cooper added,”The reality is that we’ve just won by an absolute landslide – the elections Thursday last week – because people are raging, furious, about the levels of both illegal and legal immigration in this country.

“We need to freeze immigration because the way to get our economy going is to freeze immigration, get wages up for British workers, train our own people, get our own people who are economically inactive back into work.”

Following the UK’s exit from the EU in January 2020, net migration – the difference between those entering and leaving the country – spiked.

It hit 903,000 in the year to June 2023, before dropping to 728,000 by mid-2024.

The Home Office reported that the number of ‘Health and Care Worker’ visas rose from 31,800 in 2021 to 145,823 in 2023, largely driven by an influx of South Asian and Sub-Saharan African nationals working as care workers.

However, the figure dropped sharply to 27,174 in 2024, attributed to new measures introduced by the Conservative government and increased compliance efforts.

The crackdown is expected to raise concerns in the care sector, which has long highlighted that low wages are fueling a recruitment crisis. The sector is now also grappling with the impact of the increased employer National Insurance.