According to a UK Home Office announcement stronger measures are now to be added to the Employments Rights Bill to punish employers sponsoring migrant workers who pay less than the minimum wage or “repeatedly defy visa rules.” Other additions to the Bill passing through Parliament currently are set to curtail the practice of clawing back visa costs from sponsored employees.

Enforceable action plans for UK sponsors found not to comply with immigration rules will be quadrupled from three months to a year – even for “minor visa breaches” according to the Home Office. While such plans are in place, employers are restricted from hiring more overseas workers.

For repeat offenders, sanctions will be doubled from a maximum 12 months to at least two years, the Home Office also announced. – This would appear to refer to the “cooling off” period before a sponsor whose licence has been revoked can apply for a new one.

These rule changes will first apply to Skilled Worker sponsors, including sponsors of care workers, then extend to other sponsored routes in future. They are partly a response to recent revelations of the extent of exploitation of migrant workers in the care sector where 450 sponsor licences have been recently revoked.

Whether these new measures will go far enough to stop exploitation when migrant care workers’ immigration status still relies on their sponsor remains to be seen. As well as pay and hours exploitation, care workers have been asked to pay back significant visa and sponsorship costs by agencies if they terminate an employment contract early.

Employers with migrant workers will be keen to see if the Employment Rights Bill will include a full ban on clawback clauses and whether some costs may still be passed onto sponsored employees if they break an employment contract early. Sanctions – including losing a sponsor licence – already exist to preclude passing the Immigration Skills Charge of up to £1,000 onto sponsored workers. Whether new legislation will add sponsorship, visa, Immigration Health Surcharge and/or legal fees to costs that employers must not pass on to employees is unclear. The Home Office release suggests that employers could be facing an expansion of costs they should shoulder where it intimates: “the new powers will ensure employers who recruit internationally will be required to pay associated costs themselves, which is fair and reasonable for employers that do not recruit from the domestic workforce.”

Migration minister Seema Malhotra adds: “no longer will employers be able to flout the rules with little consequence or exploit international workers for costs they were always supposed to pay if they choose not to recruit domestically… workers coming to the UK to support our health and social care service have all too often found themselves plunged into unjustifiable insecurity and debt. This can, and must, end.”

These announcements come as figures released by the Office for National Statistics show net migration has dropped sharply to 728,000 for the year to June 2024, a reduction of 20% on the previous 12 months.

Whether the prime motivation behind today’s announcements of new measures in the Employment Rights Bill is combatting exploitation or further reducing immigration is debatable. Do we really need longer enforcement periods for up to a year for breaches of sponsor compliance – or just more enforcement? A quick look at the government’s sponsor register shows that there are currently over 120,000 sponsor licences (some of these will be the same sponsor but with different categories). Of these, only 16 appear to have B-ratings where a sponsor’s compliance performance may necessitate an action plan to rectify their processes.

However, it is encouraging to see in today’s announcement that the Government confirms that they have devoted £16 million funding to respond to care sector exploitation, include funding support for international care workers to understand their rights and support carers to “remain working in the care sector when they have been impacted by their sponsor’s licence being revoked.”