Health and care worker and student visa numbers continuing to fall

The statistics for the period July to September 2024 have been published today, showing a very large drop in health and care worker visas, a lesser but still significant drop in students, a fall in the asylum grant rate that doesn’t seem likely to achieve much beyond creating further chaos in the tribunals and maybe some good news on the fee waiver backlog? Although the way the Home Office reports that data does make it difficult to see if there has been a negative impact on grant rates for fee waivers we know from experience that it is usually the quality of decisions that is sacrificed on the altar of speed.

Work routes

The latest statistics on work routes show a huge drop in the number of health and care visas issued. For main applicants, these are down 84% between April and September 2024 compared with the same period in 2023 and dependant visas have dropped by 74%.

Dr Dora-Olivia Vicol, CEO of the Work Rights Centre responded to the latest figures as follows:

If this downward trend in Health and Care visas is to continue, there is the serious question of how the adult social care sector will cope when recent recruitment has been reliant on visa workers, with one in three carers being foreign nationals.

The number of people extending their leave in work routes has increased by 35% compared to the year ending September 2023. This is driven by those using the graduate, health and care and skilled worker routes.

Sponsor licences for work and study

For the period July to September 2024 there were 8,299 decisions on sponsor licence applications. This is 24% less than the same period last year. 5,054 (62%) were granted and the rest were either rejected or withdrawn. When comparing year on year, there were 34,765 grants (22% higher than last year) from 47,897 decisions (up from 36,804 in the year ending September 2023).

Temporary work

There has been a slight year on year increase of 7% in the number of temporary work visas issued. The largest proportion of these is seasonal worker visas, at 45% of the total granted and a 14% year on year increase.

Students

As of 1 January 2024, most students starting a course in the UK are prevented from bringing their family with them. Since that change, the statistics show that the number of visas granted to dependants in the student route has fallen by 84% compared to the same period (first nine months) in 2023, from 114,293 to 17,978.

The decrease in main applicants for student visas has also dropped, by 16% since the beginning of the year, compared with the same period last year. The full year on year decrease is 19%. There has been a much bigger drop in in-country applications for the student route, either extensions or switching, which has seen a 37% decrease compared to the previous year.

Family

The statistics on family related applications show that there has been a 31% increase in family related entry clearance applications in the year ending September 2024 and a 7% increase in grants. For in-country grants in family routes, there has been an 8% year on year increase, to 124,776.

Fee waiver

The fee waiver statistics show that the backlog is looking better than it did in the last quarterly statistics

Resettlement

The statistics on “safe and legal” routes show that these options remain largely limited to Ukrainians and Hong Kong (BNO) nationals. The tiny bit of grey you can see on the chart applies to everyone else and includes the restrictive Afghan schemes. In the year ending September 2024 the UK resettled 9,554 refugees and 95% of those arrived through Afghan schemes. A total of 506 people came via the UK resettlement scheme or mandate scheme in that year.

Family reunion grants have increased considerably from the year ending September 2023 where only 5,805 visas were granted. In the year ending September 2024 19,154 people were granted family reunion visas and over half of them were children.

Asylum

There has been very little change in the number of people claiming asylum compared to the previous year (99,790 people in total including dependants, a 1% increase).

The year ending September 2024 had 21% fewer people arriving via the Channel. 17% of those who did make that journey were Afghans. In September this year we reported a worrying new trend of refusals of Afghan asylum claims, and we can see this in the statistics that refusals for July to September 2023 were under 1% and for the most recent quarter these have shot up to 39% and grants are only 45% (table Asy_D02, main applicant data only).

The overall grant rate for all asylum claims has dropped to 52% in the year ending September 2024. The Afghan cases will have certainly had an impact there but will not account for all of the drop from what was a grant rate of 75% for the year ending September 2023. A low grant rate means a much larger number of appeals moving across the tribunal, in circumstances where the legal aid crisis means people are more likely to be unrepresented. This makes resolving this cases a much more difficult process, as the complex issues involved cannot be presented properly by unrepresented litigants, who may not speak English.

The Lord Chancellor’s decision on legal aid rates is due by the end of the month (so we will presumably get the details tomorrow) but it will take a long time to fix the damage and in the meantime, the mess in the tribunal system is going to get considerably worse. I don’t see how refusing Afghan claims in these numbers is helping matters as surely they will succeed on appeal.

The total number of cases awaiting a decision has increased slightly in the period July to September 2024 and is 13% higher than at the end of June. This is because most asylum claims were stuck in limbo as the previous government was refusing to process them. Since July, processing has restarted but in most cases interviews will take place before a decision can be made and that accounts for the increase.

The homelessness statistics for the period April to June 2024 are also out today and show, for households owed a prevention duty, an increase of 84.6% in households required to leave asylum accommodation compared to the same quarter last year. For households owed a relief duty there was an increase of 308.5% in households required to leave asylum accommodation.

EU Settlement Scheme

Late applications to the EU Settlement Scheme continue to be made in large numbers. There have been 560,866 late applications made and decided since 1 July 2021.

In the year ending September 2024 99,747 late applications have been decided and 40,294 of those have been rejected as invalid, 21,735 have been refused and 7,141 have been withdrawn. 19,822 of those late applications have resulted in a grant of settlement (table EUSS_D03, “Late applicant”).

Detention and returns

The detention statistics show that a large proportion (50%) of people who are detained are released on immigration bail and this is the most common reason for leaving detention. In the year ending September 2024 44% of people left detention because they were removed from the UK, an increase from 32% the previous year.

As ever, the Home Office has this to say about the high proportion of people who are detained and then released:

The longer term fall in the numbers of returns from detention may also be linked to increasing numbers of detainees raising issues that prevented their return, as described in the Home Office research paper ‘Issues raised by people facing return in immigration detention’ (2024). This research showed that 73% of people detained within the UK following immigration offences in 2019 were recorded as having raised one or more issues that may have delayed or prevented their return. These issues included raising an asylum claim, making a legal challenge, or a claim to be a potential victim of modern slavery or human trafficking.

And as ever, I won’t let that slide without explaining that the reason people raise issues once detained is because of the difficulty in accessing a legal aid lawyer in the community. Areas such as family immigration reasons for being entitled to stay in the UK are out of scope of legal aid entirely, and I have already mentioned the shortage of asylum legal aid lawyers above. Until legal aid is properly funded and everyone who needs legal assistance is able to access it outside of detention then the Home Office will need to accept that claims will be raised in detention and removing people will be less likely where they have not had a proper opportunity to put their case forward earlier.