The agent behind a Facebook advert offering help in obtaining a care visa in the UK responded within minutes — with an invoice for £6,000 and a list of documents needed.
The agent told an undercover reporter that they would not even have to work as a care worker once in the UK. Their wife could also easily find a job and children could come as well.
But they would have to act quickly due to new rules being introduced by the UK government on March 11 banning care workers bringing family members with them and tighter regulation on which companies could act as a sponsor for a care visa. The price would increase to £8,000 for a “family package,” the agent said.
This was one of several offers the undercover reporter received only minutes after typing the words “care worker visa” into Facebook. The social media platform is awash with posts advertising their services to secure such visas for the UK.
They warn of the need to act urgently given the new restrictions. “New policies and new threshold for skilled and unskilled workers,” one of the adverts says. “We are a DM away, send us a message now to get your process done.”
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If all the documents were in order then a certificate of sponsorship from a UK company would be “fully processed” in six working days. The agent promised a “101 per cent guarantee” of obtaining this certificate of sponsorship. The visa application process would then follow and while they were unable to provide the same guarantee, given it was the Home Office that would have the final say, they offered a “100 per cent refund policy”. But they added that the prospect of the Home Office denying their visa was “almost impossible”.
The fees these middlemen are charging individuals are more than 20 times more than it costs to apply for a three-year visa directly on the UK government website.
Mike Padgham, who runs a group of care homes in North Yorkshire, said the need to pay for middlemen to find a sponsor is also completely unnecessary as foreign care workers are in high demand and needed to fill more than 150,000 vacancies in the sector.
The five homes that are part of his St Cecilia’s care group, in Scarborough, are so desperate for foreign workers that they pay for their flights and first six months’ accommodation.
“It’s wrong, there’s no need for middlemen advertising on social media because people ought to contact the care homes directly and you don’t have to pay,” he said. “We pay for people’s flights themselves and their first six months’ accommodation. There’s no need for a middleman.
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“They’re [foreign care workers] essential for us, we employ 32 of them and we couldn’t survive without them.”
It also costs a sponsor only £239 for each visa, although they are also required to pay the immigration skills surcharge which can be between £364 to £1,000.
The abuse of the care visa by middlemen ripping foreign workers off is one of the reasons why the Home Office is introducing stricter rules for sponsors. From March 11, only employers that are undertaking Care Quality Commission (CQC) registered activities will be eligible to sponsor a health and care visa.
The ban on foreign care workers bringing dependants with them is designed to reduce net migration. More than 120,000 children accompanied the 103,316 care workers who came to the UK in the year to September.
An investigation by UK Visas and Immigration (UKVI), the Home Office agency responsible for the visa system, has found widespread abuse, some of it extending into criminal behaviour.
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They found some agents charging migrants more than £25,000 for services including forged documentation such as fake passports and hospital letters stating they have worked in the health and care sector.
Those same migrants are sometimes then given children to traffic to the UK. The UKVI’s investigation also found several individuals were advertising certificates of sponsorship for sale over social media. The most common countries for middlemen to operate in are India, Nigeria and Zimbabwe.
Random spot checks by Border Force officers have found fraudulent applications, including one migrant who was sponsored by a care provider who had been granted 498 visas since May 2022. The CQC subsequently confirmed that this care provider had been dormant since September 2021 and was no longer providing any services.
Another migrant had provided false employment letters for care work in a hospital in their home country. When the sponsor was checked, it was found to be dormant on Companies House despite having sponsored more than 40 care worker visas in a short period. This was only one of several other examples.
There were also examples of bonded labour whereby an individual paid £8,000 in rent to the company that sponsored their visa upfront. Another paid £21,000 to their sponsor for their visa, which was not only illegal but about 40 times the cost of sponsorship.
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Over two months last summer, there were 25 cases where a caseworker found information within an employment contract or other information that indicated that prohibited costs would be deducted from the migrant’s salary.
UKVI has found widespread evidence of care homes not paying salaries to migrants and effectively forcing them to do unpaid work. One person had not received a salary in six months. The same company had sponsored 263 applicants.
The investigation has also found abuse of accommodation. In one case they found 39 migrants residing in a five-bedroom properly, according to their paperwork.
Professor Brian Bell, chairman of the Migration Advisory Committee that advises the government on immigration policy and helped uncover some of the abuse of the visa scheme, says the government should be going further than simply requiring care homes to be registered with the CQC.
He says the CQC lacks the necessary resources to check up and ensure that registered care homes are abiding by the rules.
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“I’m fairly sceptical,” he said of the new requirements. Instead of just being CQC registered, which is what the new rules are going to require, you might want to make it so that they’ve been registered for a couple of years consistently because one of the things that we’re seeing are these companies who are essentially setting up on day one, and immediately becoming a sponsor and bringing in foreign workers.
“And actually that’s not a particularly good model, you want people to be in the care sector trying to make it a go and then needing almost as a last resort to bring in foreign workers because we can’t recruit domestically.
“So having been in operation for a couple of years consistently then potentially makes it a bit more likely that the people you’re giving sponsor licences to really are proper care homes who are providing the service.”
Bell added: “There’s no doubt that because the regulation is not very strong in the sector, they’ll still be lots of people who fall through that gap, even if they’re CQC registered, because they just want to be visited.”
A Home Office spokesman said: “We strongly condemn offering health and care worker visa holders employment under false pretences and will continue to revoke licences from those who abuse the system, as we do not tolerate illegal activity in the labour market.
“To address significant concerns about high levels of non-compliance, worker exploitation and abuse within the sector, providers in England will soon only be able to sponsor migrant workers if they are undertaking activities regulated by the Care Quality Commission.
“As with all our policies, we will keep them under close review and if needed, we will not hesitate to go further.”
The agencies pictured were all approached for comment by the Times. None have yet responded.
This article is subject to the following published correction: in “Revealed: the middlemen ripping off foreign workers for care visas” (online, Feb 23, and in print under the headline “Foreign care workers are ripped off by visa agents’, News, Feb 24) we mistakenly published an image of Yash Dubal, Director and Senior Immigration Associate at AY & J Solicitors. We confirm that neither Mr Dubal nor his firm has any connection with the issues raised in the article and we apologise for the error.
