A Government-commissioned review of the UK’s Shortage Occupation List has recommended scrapping the list altogether. In a scathing report the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) warns that the list - which helps employers hire foreign workers in roles facing serious labour shortages - should not be used for anything more than a temporary fix for labour shortages. They say the current system is damaging because it undercuts local workers, drives down wages and leaves migrants dependent on the employers sponsoring them open to exploitation. We’ll speak to an immigration specialist about what scrapping the list would mean for employers.
The MAC carries out periodic reviews of the UK’s Shortage Occupation List on behalf of the government and last February the Home Secretary asked the independent committee to hold a public consultation and review the list. During the consultation employers bodies lobbied hard for the list to be extended to more occupations, but MAC has rejected that approach in favour of a longer-term solution which, they say, lies with improving training, work conditions and job progression. They submitted their report on 3 October along with a letter to Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, and Robert Jenrick, Minister for Immigration in which they made that point very clearly.
Time will tell what recommendations, if any, the government will implement but it seems likely that the Shortage Occupation List will be much reduced and may indeed be abolished altogether. If the List is maintained the MAC intends to do a further minor review of it in Spring 2024. Meanwhile the MAC says the list should be viewed as a temporary solution and that employers must find other ways to alleviate skills shortages, by which they mean having longer-term recruitment plans and strategies.
So let’s consider what those plans might look like. Maria Gravelle is an immigration specialist and earlier she joined me by video-link from Edinburgh to discuss it:
Maria Gravelle: “I think to understand why the MAC have recommended this, it's helpful to understand what the Shortage Occupation List is and what it serves. So it's a list that is drawn up by the government on recommendations made from the MAC, the Migration Advisory Committee, and it's a list of jobs that the government consider to be in short supply in the UK. Now, the benefit of being on the Shortage Occupation List is that job - it's organised by code so we often talk about the job code - if you’re sponsoring somebody for specifically a skilled worker visa under one of the job codes that is on the Shortage Occupation List, you can rely on a lower salary threshold than the going rate salary for the skilled worker visa. Now, the impact of that, as the MAC have identified, is that that can increase the risk of exploitation of migrant workers by offering them a lower than market rate salary. They also raised the point that it can also drive down wages for local workers who operate in these sectors that these job codes are found in and, crucially, for many jobs that are currently on the Shortage Occupation List the average salary is way above what the lower shortage occupation salary would be so it’s actually practically not really that helpful a list. It's helpful to some sectors. So recently, the government introduced care jobs to the Shortage Occupation List where those roles were previously not eligible for sponsorship and they got around that by adding those jobs to the Shortage Occupation List which was quite a novel approach, but instead of doing that, what the MAC has suggested is that it would be more impactful to simply set up visa routes specific for that sector with eligibility criteria that are tailored to that sector, rather than doing it in this roundabout way of having the Shortage Occupation List which comes with these additional risks in terms of the lower salary. So that was why the MAC had initially recommended to get rid of the list and replace it with either sector specific immigration routes, or to rename it rather than Shortage Occupation List, the Salary Discount List, which is more reflective of what actually is in practice.”
Joe Glavina: “The MAC’s report says employers need to think about putting in place a longer-term recruitment plan and strategy going forward. Presumably, that's along the lines of advice you're getting to clients right now.”
Maria Gravelle: “Yes, absolutely. A lot of the clients that we work with, most of the jobs that are currently on the Shortage Occupation List that come up for our clients include engineering roles, they include IT roles for tech companies, and the impact on those sectors is going to be very minimal if there are changes to the Shortage Occupation List because, as I said, the salaries that are on offer for those jobs tend to be, just on market value, much higher than the minimum threshold that being on the Shortage Occupation List would actually offer. So for our clients who sponsor engineers, who sponsor IT professionals, if those jobs are removed from the Shortage Occupation List, or if the Shortage Occupation Lists was scrapped altogether, the impact would pretty much be minimal. I mean, there is a small fee concession that comes with sponsoring somebody on a shortage occupation role, so there's a reduction from the application fee, which roughly is around £100 to £200 which in the grand scheme of sponsorship, I mean, certainly with any concessions like that we should absolutely take them, but in the grand scheme of sponsorship the cost difference is fairly minimal. So for our clients sponsoring on current shortage occupation roles, like in engineering and in IT, the difference not really going to make any sort of measurable impact. Where the changes to the Shortage Occupation List may come into play are for sectors like the care sector where the Shortage Occupation List is currently really the only window for that sector to access skilled worker sponsorship for some of its more hard-to-fill roles. So for those clients who operate, as I say, in the care sector specifically, watching what happens with the MAC’s recommendations will certainly be very interesting. In any event, the changes that were made to the Shortage Occupation List to impact on the care sector were always advertised as being temporary so changes were always going to be on the horizon, and most of our clients in that sector would be prepared for that in any event.”
That report by MAC is called ‘The Migration Advisory Committee’s Review of the UK’s shortage occupation list 2023’ and we have put a link to it in the transcript of this programme for you.
LINKS
- Link to Migration Advisory Committee’s Review of the UK’s shortage occupation list 2023
