We as the Great British PAC are shocked, though sadly not surprised, by the scale of the scandal now laid bare before the British public. Rogue care firms, companies later struck off or suspended for underpaying their workers, for sponsoring visas for jobs that did not exist, and for systematically exploiting the very migrants they brought into the country, were granted the right to import some 100,000 foreign workers into the United Kingdom. This is not conjecture. It is the conclusion of an analysis of official Home Office records, and it reveals for the first time just how comprehensively the so-called "Boriswave" visa system was abused.
According to the analysis, first reported by The Telegraph, care firms that were later sanctioned for serious breaches were awarded at least 99,686 certificates of sponsorship, the documents required to bring a migrant worker into the country. That figure, astonishing as it is, almost certainly understates the true scale of the problem, because the data for businesses that awarded five or fewer certificates was redacted. The real number is higher. Nobody knows by how much, and that in itself is an indictment of the oversight regime that was supposed to protect both British workers and the migrants themselves.
The figures deserve to be set out in full, because they are staggering. Between the start of 2022 and the end of 2025, the Home Office issued 1,443 suspension notices to businesses that had awarded at least one certificate of sponsorship to a care worker or senior care worker. Some 1,049 care businesses had their licences revoked outright in the same period. In total, 1,297 companies received at least one sanction, and many received several. Among them were 345 businesses that had each awarded 100 or more certificates of sponsorship. These were not marginal operators on the fringes of the system. They were significant importers of labour, and they were breaking the rules while doing it.
The individual cases uncovered by Home Office investigators read like a catalogue of contempt for the law. Prestine Healthcare Group in Scotland had precisely one employee when it was added to the official register of sponsors. In less than three years, it proceeded to award 163 certificates of sponsorship for migrants to come to the UK. When investigators looked closer, they found that the vacancies for which these migrants had been sponsored were not genuine. Some of those brought into the country as care staff were found working in a kitchen or an office. GeoCare Services, another sanctioned provider, was found to be paying staff significantly less than the amount declared on their certificates of sponsorship, a breach it attempted to explain away by claiming workers were simply not turning up. Licences can be revoked for hiring workers illegally, sponsoring bogus roles, underpaying staff, or charging recruitment fees, which are banned outright. The system was being gamed at every point where it was possible to game it.
The human cost falls on the migrants themselves. Anyone sponsored by an organisation that loses its licence has a 60-day window to find a new sponsor, under the rules set out on the government's own guidance page, or face classification as an overstayer and removal from the UK. Men and women who came here in good faith, often having paid dearly for the privilege, are left destitute or deported through no fault of their own, while the bosses who profited from the fraud too often escape meaningful consequence.
The political context makes this scandal sharper still. The care worker visa route was introduced by the last Conservative government as part of the post-Brexit immigration system, and between 2021 and 2024 up to 4.2 million people entered the UK or were granted long-term visas during the surge now universally known as the Boriswave. Labour finally closed the care worker route to new overseas applicants on 22 July 2025, but only after nearly 650,000 migrants had already used it. Robert Bates, research director at the Centre for Migration Control, which conducted the analysis, did not mince his words. "The care visa has been a disaster for Britain," he said, "with hundreds of thousands of low-skilled individuals and their dependants using the route to enter Britain. This research reveals the rampant fraud and improper practices that underpinned the Boriswave."
Mr Bates argues ministers should go further still, barring foreign care staff from extending their visas. That demand lands at a politically combustible moment. The Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, is already under sustained back-bench pressure over her plan to force foreign care workers, classed as low-skilled or medium-skilled, to wait as long as 15 years to claim indefinite leave to remain, up from five years at present, under the government's "earned settlement" proposals. Andy Burnham is reportedly considering exempting care workers from the crackdown as part of his pledge to overhaul social care, despite Home Office estimates that the net lifetime fiscal cost of allowing them to settle would be up to £10 billion.
The Home Office, for its part, points to its enforcement record as proof of vigour, announcing moves to strip hundreds of care providers of their sponsor licences in what it calls a clampdown on "abuse and exploitation" by "shameful rogue operators". Enforcement has indeed accelerated sharply. According to quarterly sponsorship statistics, 1,516 businesses had their licences revoked in the fourth quarter of 2025 alone, an all-time high, and more than 3,100 revocations were recorded across 2025, the highest figure since records began.
But we as the Great British PAC must ask the obvious question. Why were these licences granted in the first place? A clampdown after the fact is not a substitute for diligence before it. A system that awarded sponsorship rights to a one-employee company, which then imported 163 workers for jobs that did not exist, was not a system with teething problems. It was a system without meaningful checks, designed in haste after Brexit, exploited at industrial scale, and policed only once the damage was done.
The British public was promised an immigration system that would take back control. What it received was a conveyor belt of certificates, handed out to rogue operators who treated our border as a business model. Nearly 100,000 sponsored migrants, 1,297 sanctioned companies, £10 billion in projected fiscal costs, and thousands of exploited workers left with 60 days to save their lives in this country. These are the numbers of a national failure. Accountability must follow, and it must begin with an honest admission of how badly, and for how long, the system was abused.