Westminster Hall debate on improving the UK visa system

CJ McKinney; Greg Oxley

The UK’s legal migration system allows people to move into the country on a range of visas. They can be broadly grouped into study, work, family and humanitarian.

From March 2025 to March 2026, the Home Office issued 779,000 such visas. Around half were related to study and around one third were related to work:

410,000 were categorised as study visas (of which 18,000 were partners and children of the main visa holder)
253,000 were categorised as work visas (of which 86,000 were partners and children of the main visa holder)
62,000 were categorised as family visas (including family members of refugees)
27,000 were humanitarian visas (not including family members of refugees)
The rest were other visa types

Overall, an estimated 813,000 people migrated to the UK in 2025 and 642,000 emigrated from it, resulting in net migration of around 171,000. This was the lowest level since 2012, excluding the covid-19 pandemic, and a 48% reduction on 2024.

Some visas lead to permanent residence – formally known as settlement or indefinite leave to remain – after five years. These include the main sponsored work visa, Skilled Worker (including the Health and Care subcategory), as well as the spouse/partner visa for people in a long-term relationship with a British citizen or permanent resident.

Other visas do not have this route to settlement. International students, for example, typically need to switch onto a Skilled Worker, spouse/partner or other visa offering indefinite leave to remain if they wish to settle in the UK permanently. The same is true of some work visas, such as Youth Mobility or High Potential Individual.

Someone who cannot extend their stay beyond the term of their visa will typically be expected to leave the UK. In some cases, people in this position may apply for asylum or under the European Convention on Human Rights, although the outcome depends on personal circumstances. Asylum and human rights applications are beyond the scope of this briefing.

1. Managing the visa system

The Home Office is responsible for the legal migration system. It has various levers of control:

Setting visa criteria. There are generally no quotas within each visa category, but the rules on who qualifies for a visa can be easily adjusted by amending the immigration rules. Visa categories can be created or abolished, or the eligibility criteria loosed or restricted, at short notice and without parliamentary approval.
The sponsorship system. All student visas and most work visas require a sponsor: a university offering the person a place or a business offering them a job. Institutions have detailed compliance responsibilities: for example, a university must normally withdraw sponsorship from a student whose attendance falls below 70%. Organisations found to have failed in these duties risk losing their licence to sponsor migrants, which for universities or large companies can be damaging or even fatal.
The ‘hostile environment’. Various private and public sector organisations have been made responsible for checking whether a given person is barred by visa regulations from accessing (for example) employment, banking, benefits or non-emergency healthcare. Officially known as the ‘compliant environment’, such checks try to ensure that migrants adhere to their visa conditions and are incentivised to leave if their visa has expired.

In practice, the immigration system does not always run smoothly. A watchdog called the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration is charged with monitoring the “efficiency and effectiveness” of the legal migration system (among other things). But recent inspection reports have covered border control, unauthorised migration and asylum; the last one squarely focused on mainstream visa operations was published in March 2024 (on social care visas).

2. Report by Blake Stephenson MP

The sponsor of the debate, Blake Stephenson (Conservative), published a report on the UK’s visa system in March 2026. It concluded that the system is “entirely unfit” for purpose and that legal migration is “out of control”.

Mr Stephenson argued that “Britain’s visa system is not working for the British people” and that “loopholes missed by successive piecemeal immigration reforms have created potential backdoors to Britain” which are being “exploited by malicious actors taking advantage of our goodwill”.

The report made 30 wide-ranging recommendations across three broad areas: Home Office compliance operations, restricting visa criteria and publishing more data. They included:

• restrict work visa sponsorship to companies with at least 6 employees, to reduce the opportunity for bad actors to game the system

• impose a limit on organisations sponsoring visas, such that at any one time a maximum of 20% of an organisation’s workforce may be made up of employees on work-related visas

• urgently review NHS recruitment policies, to ensure that applicants who would require the issuance of a new Health & Care Worker Visa are only hired in the absence of suitably skilled domestic staff

• abolish the religious visa routes [..] and the Charity Worker Visa

• place a cap on the number of international student places that can be offered by UK institutions

• universities should be required to publish total figures for the number of student visas they sponsor each academic year.

• reform Family Visas to provide a preferential visa for the dependents of British citizens when compared with the dependents of people with settlement

• review and improve the ongoing monitoring of compliance with visa conditions. This should include consideration of requirement for regular evidence provision within the visa period. Failure to comply with conditions should result in deportation

• The Government should not move to remote and digital-by-default English language testing for visas [see tender notice and media coverage]

• create a robust data set that enables a robust analysis of the long-term choices made by people with Indefinite Leave to Remain.

Changes to the rules on qualifying for indefinite leave to remain are among the measures being undertaken by the Labour government, as summarised below.

3. The Labour government’s changes to visa rules

In May 2025 the government published a white paper policy document called Restoring control over the immigration system. The document proposed some changes to make it harder to move to and settle in the UK, with a view to reducing net migration.

The Library briefing Changes to UK visa and settlement rules after the 2025 immigration white paper provides an overview of the proposals and their implementation status.

Some of the key changes include:

shortening the list of jobs for which employers can sponsor someone for a Skilled Worker visa (partly implemented)
removing social care workers from the list of eligible jobs, so that employers are no longer allowed to recruit them from abroad (now implemented)
exploring a levy on English universities’ income from international student fees (not yet implemented)
making it harder for universities to keep their licence to sponsor student visas by introducing tougher compliance rules (not yet implemented)
reducing the standard length of theGraduate visa, for international students to stay on and work in the UK, from two years to 18 months (being implemented in January 2027)
stricter English language rules for work visa applicants (now implemented)
increasing the qualifying period for indefinite leave to remain (not yet implemented)
making it easier for people to come to the UK on certain visas aimed at highly skilled migrants (now implemented)

Most of these changes are being made by amending the immigration rules. They do not require an act of Parliament, except for the levy on student fees.