When you think about the immigration debate of recent years your mind may automatically turn to dinghies and small boats arriving illegally on British shores. Understandable when there are record numbers making the illegal journey across the Channel.
But there is a lesser-explored element of migration, one that works through a series of flaws and loopholes in the system allowing for backdoor entry to Britain. A report examining how legal migration goes wrong, based on responses to more than 100 written parliamentary questions, attempts to shine a light on just this.
Its thirty recommendations come from Blake Stephenson, the new Conservative MP for Mid Bedfordshire, recently tipped as one of those set for promotion. What each recommendation shows is damning: the Government does not know what is happening inside its own visa system, and does not seem especially interested in finding out.
Consider the register of companies licensed to sponsor work visas, which contains 138,021 entries. At least 16,831 of those companies – more than 12 per cent – have five or fewer employees. Over three thousand of them have just one. That is thousands of micro-businesses, some of them – as a Times investigation revealed earlier this year – operating as visa factories, selling access to Britain as a commercial product. Stephenson’s solution is to require sponsoring companies to have at least six employees to help ensure legitimacy.
But no one has really been looking at such issues. The Home Office holds no data on what proportion of the workforce of companies eligible to sponsor visas consists of visa holders. When Stephenson asked whether workplace inspection numbers were available, he was told the data was not easily obtainable. We’ve heard of the data desert, well here inspections happen in a fog – and the Home Office seems content to leave it that way.
Then there is the Health and Care Worker Visa, through which nearly 750,000 visas have been issued since 2020, with almost 450,000 associated with dependents. The Government announced last May that overseas recruitment of care workers would end, except around 200 visas for social care were still being issued in Q3 2025. Meanwhile, neither the Home Office nor the Department for Health and Social Care has been able to tell Stephenson how many of those who arrived to work in social care are still working in social care. Or still in the UK at all.
The picture on Student Visas is no less concerning. More than 750,000 visas have been issued for students and their dependents since the election, with universities largely free to decide for themselves whether a student’s English is adequate – guided by the commercial incentive to fill lecture theatres with fee-paying internationals.
Stephenson has uncovered quite the loophole to get around a visa’s English language requirements: a student can arrive speaking no English, study a degree in their native language on a student visa, pass it, and use that degree as proof of English proficiency for future visa applications. The Home Office cannot say whether this is happening as they have no published statistics on what proportion of students are using the approved Secure English Language Test. It may not be widespread, but the system permits it entirely within the rules, which means politicians should look at tightening the rules.
Other categories have attracted almost no scrutiny. Minister of Religion Visas and Religious Worker Visas have quietly delivered somewhere between 3,000 and 7,000 arrivals in the past 18 months. The financial requirement for a three-year and one month Minister of Religion Visa, including a partner and three children, is £2,270. To support a family of five. For three years. Stephenson says abolish the religious routes entirely.
On compliance, the report reveals something that should alarm even those broadly sympathetic to the current migration system. The Home Office does not know what proportion of visa holders it holds a UK address for. It has no routine check to verify that a visa holder is living where it thinks they are. Instead, visa holders are “encouraged” to update their details – it is less a border control than an honour system.
Meanwhile, National Insurance numbers do not expire when visas do, nor do the Treasury kinow which numbers are associated with visas, but there are no confirmed checks that they cease to be associated with tax payments at the expiry of a visa. There is effectively no mechanism to catch a visa holder who has stayed in work – and in the country – long after their legal right to remain has lapsed. Matching NI numbers with visa records appears so basic a reform it is almost extraordinary it does not already exist.
Underlying all of this is a data failure that is, in its own way, the most damning finding of all. Of 118 written questions asked of Government departments, around 54 were answered only partially or not at all. The Home Office appears to have concluded that transparency in the visa system is an expense it would rather not bear.
The backdoors to Britain were not thrown open by any single policy. It is an accumulation alongside a failure to see the consequences. Stephenson bothering to look and produce this report is a sterling effort, but for real change it requires the Government to pay attention too.