The Home Secretary appeared before the Home Affairs Select Committee on 3rd June 2025, offering fresh insight into the government’s evolving the UKs immigration strategy. The session highlighted a clear shift to reducing reliance on overseas labour and pressing employers and sectors to engage more deeply with the domestic workforce.

Key takeaways

• The Home Secretary believes that raising the English language and skill level requirements for Skilled Worker visas, alongside scrapping the Health and Care visa for overseas workers, would reduce net migration by 100,000 people annually. This would mark a significant contraction in one of the UK’s largest visa routes.
  
• The Immigration Salary List (ISL) also came under scrutiny. It currently allows employers to pay a 20% reduced ‘going rate’ for certain roles, a practice the Home Secretary criticised as giving overseas hires an artificial cost advantage over domestic workers, particularly in the Health and Care sector.
  
  Though we know (from the recently published Immigration White Paper) that the ISL will be replaced by a new Temporary Shortage List, which will be substantially shorter. Though the ISL currently contains 23 roles, the Home Secretary oddly claimed the new list would be “180 roles shorter,” suggesting the figure refers to job titles nested within broader occupation codes. Importantly, any occupations added to the new list must now be aligned with a workforce strategy agreed upon by a new inter-agency group...

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