Corporate report

Letter to Suella Braverman, Home Secretary and Robert Jenrick, Minister for Immigration

Updated 3 October 2023

Migration Advisory Committee
2 Marsham Street
London
SW1P 4DF

[email protected]

Rt Hon Suella Braverman KC MP
Rt Hon Robert Jenrick MP
2 Marsham Street
London
SW1P 4DF

3rd October 2023

Dear Home Secretary, Minister,

I am pleased to inform you that we have published the Migration Advisory Committee’s (MAC) 2023 review of the Shortage Occupation List (SOL), a copy of which has been provided to your office.

Having been commissioned to review the SOL in August 2022, we were subsequently asked to pause this work pending clarification on the government’s priorities surrounding the Skilled Worker (SW) route. Work on this review recommenced in March 2023 with extensive stakeholder engagement across all sectors of the economy and the constituent nations of the UK. We are thankful to stakeholders for their efforts in responding to our Call for Evidence (CfE), and we look forward to engaging further on issues identified within their respective sectors.

The most substantive change compared to previous reviews is that we have conducted this review on the basis of our recommendation that no employer should be able to pay below the “going rate” regardless of whether they are experiencing shortage. The going rate is the full-time annual salary for each occupation that we estimate only the lowest quarter of workers are paid less than. The going rate helps to protect resident workers from undercutting and reduces the potential exploitation of migrants. This recommendation results in a large number of occupations being made ineligible for consideration. In addition, as the only significant benefit of inclusion on the SOL is a salary threshold reduction, we also excluded national pay scale occupations from consideration.

We have recommended 8 additions to the UK-wide SOL and a further 2 additions to the Scotland-only SOL. We acknowledge that we have recommended relatively few occupations for inclusion on the SOL despite the labour market remaining tight and much evidence of shortage across the economy. However, we outline in our report the several factors that have underpinned our decisions.

Despite the government providing us scope to consider lower training requirement (RQF 1-2) occupations for addition to the SOL, the Committee made the decision not to recommend any such occupations for inclusion. Stakeholders in these occupations did not meet the evidence threshold set, including a clear demonstration of efforts made to recruit from the domestic labour market. We were also concerned about the risk of exploitation of workers in many of these roles. In our view, low-wage employment is where the most serious exploitation of workers occurs, and this risk is heightened for migrants on the SW route given their reliance on being employed by a sponsoring firm to remain in the UK.

We have also recommended that care workers and senior care workers remain on the SOL, given their recent inclusion and the government’s continued failure to respond to our April 2022 report on the sector. We are increasingly concerned about the serious exploitation issues being reported within the care sector. We therefore plan to closely monitor the use of the immigration system by care work occupations, and the health and social care sector more broadly, and will provide further comment on this area in our 2023 Annual Report in December.

Within our report, we have included a series of policy recommendations relating to the role of the SOL in the immigration system. These recommendations are partly relevant to the impact the SOL currently has on elements of the immigration system beyond the SW route. However, more fundamentally, the removal of the going-rate discount means that the SOL now primarily serves to liberalise access to the SW route for low-wage jobs. The risk of exploitation in low-wage jobs, the likelihood that low-wage migrants will lead to a net fiscal cost for the UK, and the administrative burden the SW route places upon low-wage employers, mean that we are not convinced the SOL provides a sensible immigration solution to shortage issues in low wage sectors and so we recommend that it should be abolished going forward.

We have provided an alternative approach that the government may wish to consider, based on the MAC examining individual occupations or sectors where labour market issues seem particularly acute and focusing on the extent to which immigration policy may, or may not, be a helpful part of the solution. We also recommend that the SOL be renamed to the Immigration Salary Discount List (ISDL) to correctly reflect its function in the immigration system and help avoid the very clear confusion that currently exists among stakeholders as to the purpose of the list.

If the government wishes to retain the SOL as it currently is, we plan to launch our next (minor) review of the SOL in Spring 2024. This review would need to be conducted using SOC2020, and so we would require the Home Office to confirm a switch to the new occupation coding no later than the end of January 2024.

We look forward to receiving a timely response to our SOL report, to further engaging with the Home Office, and continuing to provide our independent evidence based advice.

On behalf of the Migration Advisory Committee.

Yours sincerely,

[signed]

Professor Brian Bell

Chair, Migration Advisory Committee