UK Home Office licensed sham care-visa sponsors with almost no checks, leaving migrant care workers exposed to exploitation, its inspector found.

The Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration's report to Parliament (March 2024, covering August-November 2023) found the Home Office applied a sponsor-licensing regime built for compliant employers to the high-risk care sector, with 'just one compliance officer for every 1,600 employers licensed to sponsor migrant workers' and a sponsor-licence refusal rate of only 1.5% for health and social work applicants from February 2022 to October 2023. It granted 275 certificates of sponsorship to a fraudulent applicant using the details of a care home that knew nothing of it, and 1,234 to a company that said it had four employees; visa caseworkers said they had little basis to refuse applications even where modern-slavery and exploitation concerns existed.