Improving the UK Visa System

Scott Arthur Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd June 2026 Westminster Hall

[Blake Stephenson (Mid Bedfordshire) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the matter of improving the UK visa system. 

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stuart. Immigration is one of the defining policy challenges of our time. It determines who our neighbours are and with whom we share our country, our culture, our values, our communities and our public services. Britain is operating an immigration system based on a high level of trust that the gangs who ruthlessly tear through our borders in the English channel will stop before thinking to exploit loopholes in our visa system. As a consequence, Britain is now an outlier in the world of self-interest, and our immigration system must reflect that. It must be robust enough to attract the best and the brightest from around the world, who can enrich our communities and boost our economy, but it must slam shut the back door to migrants who do not benefit our country and who burden our public services.

The simple truth is that immigration has been unsustainable for a long time. In a little under two years, more than 1.3 million people have come to live, work and study in the UK. That is more than the total population of Birmingham, leading to strain on our public services, competition for jobs and increasing pressure in our housing market. Although some migrants will have brought talent and experience, far too many have not. This has been facilitated by a visa system that is too generous and too vulnerable to exploitation. It cannot continue.

Last year I began researching the UK’s visa system, and what my team and I found was shocking. Glaring loopholes in compliance must be closed—for example, by requiring visa holders to provide an up-to-date home address during the visa period and not just at renewal or settlement, and by matching national insurance records with visa status so that illegal working can be identified and enforced in near to real time. This is legal compliance 101, and there is no excuse to keep the back doors to Britain open.

Around 140,000 organisations are eligible to sponsor work visas. The vast majority are small and medium-sized enterprises, and some of them are tiny. Nearly 17,000 have five or fewer employees. More than 3,000 have just one employee, with so-called skilled workers sponsored to work in vape shops, convenience stores and takeaways. To those looking to exploit the UK visa system, Britain is sending an open invitation to set up a bogus company and sell pretend jobs that give people the right to live in the UK.

None of this is hypothetical. During my research, I read an investigative report by The Times that uncovered visa agents selling fake jobs with companies that hold Home Office sponsorship licences. It is a lucrative business model for fraudsters who cheat our visa system, and for migrants who are desperate enough to do the same. Back in January, I asked the Minister on the Floor of the House how we could be sure that tiny companies sponsoring visas were not bogus. He promised to look at it and come back to me. He responded to me only yesterday, presumably as he was preparing for today’s debate. That is not good enough, because these are serious and urgent issues for all our constituents.

We must draw a line at the smallest of organisations being able to sponsor visas, and we must set clear limits on the proportion of an organisation’s workforce that can be made up of people on work visas. For that to be possible, the Home Office must publish the relevant data, rather than fobbing off MPs by saying that it can only be collected at a disproportionate cost. The real cost is in turning a blind eye to loopholes in our visa system. Inspections need to be regular and transparent, so that the British public can see the system working for them.

The Home Office has claimed that it regularly reviews the organisations eligible to sponsor visas, but just a cursory check finds organisations that are long defunct. The former Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy remains on the list, despite being abolished in February 2023. If Government are not joined up enough to remove historical Departments, how can there be any faith in the adequacy of checks on tens of thousands of smaller organisations across the country?

Employees who break the rules get a slap on the wrist, and repeat offenders are allowed to get back their licence to sponsor visas in as little as two years. We must be tougher. Bans on sponsoring visas should be incurred after one failed action plan following a B rating. Those bans should be permanent, with penalties for directors to stop them moving on to sponsor visas at their next rogue outfit.

In addition, too many public bodies have come to rely on immigration to fill job roles. That is ludicrous at a time when 1.1 million young British people are not in employment, education or training. The public sector should lead from the front and only sponsor visas in cases where candidates bring genuinely world-class expertise.

Astonishingly, thousands of visas are also being issued for religious and charity work to those who meet pathetically low financial requirements. Would you believe that £2,270 in the bank is enough for a religious minister to bring in a family of five for three years? A robust visa system would scrap those routes entirely. The hard truth is that they are being used to take advantage of Britain’s good will, and that must stop.

Work is not the only area where there is a problem. If someone has a high-paid, skilled job in the UK and their passport is from all but one country, they can bring their non-British spouse to the UK on a five-year dependent visa for around £1,500 in application fees. However, if a British citizen is bringing their non-British spouse to the UK for five years, that will set them back over £3,200 in fees and require two family visas. That is madness. What possible justification can there be for it to be more expensive and more difficult for British citizens to bring a non-British spouse to the UK? Even the family visa is not exclusive to citizens. Settled individuals have the same right to sponsor family visas that British citizens do. That is not fair to British citizens.

On student visas, our universities have a commercial incentive to fill lecture halls with international students, and the UK’s visa policy hands international student graduates the right to live and work in any job they like through the graduate visa. As a result, the UK takes the second largest number of international students of any country in the world—750,000 in the past couple of years. Far from attracting the best and the brightest, the visa system fails to distinguish between the quality of students.

[Dr Scott Arthur (Edinburgh South West) (Lab)]

I refer Members to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. International students have always come to the UK and it is not because of the visa system; it is because we have fantastic universities. The hon. Gentleman will know that our very best universities do not actually rely on the graduate visa scheme.

[Blake Stephenson]

I agree that we have a thriving university sector, and we must maintain it. However, the reality is that many students arriving in the UK are doing so to attend poorly performing universities, and not just the best ones. That is doing long-term harm to our country and our economy. We must close down that route by establishing a minimum academic standard for incoming students and setting a cap on institutions, based on the quality of educational provision.

Eligibility for graduate visas should also be linked to academic performance, to keep the best and the brightest while slamming closed this back-door route for low-skilled migrants. Universities should be stripped of their power to assess English language skills for incoming students, which allows them to bypass the official secure English language testing system. Those with a commercial incentive to bring in as many students as possible should not be allowed to mark their own homework. That has created an unacceptable loophole, one that trashes rules designed to ensure that the most basic of requirements is satisfied—that those who come to the UK can speak our language.

On English language testing, the Government are acting without sense and rationale. The Home Office is pressing ahead with plans to move official English language testing to a fully remote model, despite serious security concerns. Having initially ruled out remote testing, the Government U-turned after being lobbied by Peter Manderson’s firm, Global Counsel, on behalf of Duolingo. That US tech firm is now expected to win the £816 million contract, after a consortium of leading British firms withdrew from the application process, warning that the proposal exposes the UK’s immigration system to weaker security. Remote tests are extremely vulnerable to organised criminal gangs and cheats who, as I have seen at first hand, can easily overcome safeguards with technological workarounds, some of which use cheap equipment readily available on Amazon.

The Government have repeatedly promised to smash the gangs, yet they are opening a new back door to Britain for organised criminals to exploit. In a further insult to the British public, the Government initially denied meeting with Duolingo, yet a recent response to a freedom of information request shows that the Minister for Investment met Duolingo in September 2025 to discuss its offer on English language testing. Perhaps the Minister will confirm that and apologise to the British public.

All that raises serious questions about the Government’s seriousness on UK border security. There are also questions to answer about whether the £816 million contract is good value for money. The Department will have received a letter from the Public Accounts Committee, on which I serve, inviting officials to brief the Committee, and I hope the offer will be taken up. It is clear from a YouGov poll that the majority of adults from across every political party, gender and socioeconomic group oppose a move to remote-only testing for an English visa application, so why on earth would the Home Office pursue that course?

In answer to my written parliamentary questions, the Minister alluded to the changes delivering a “net positive” financial benefit for the Department. In plain English, that means that the Home Office are looking to trade the security of high-stakes English language testing for cash for the Department. I would appreciate a response from the Minister on that point. What other reason could there be for the Government’s diverging from our Australian and Canadian allies, who have both recently rejected proposals to move testing online?

We do not permit remote-only testing for driving theory tests, “Life in the UK” tests or GCSEs, so how can we, with a clear conscience, permit it for the test that decides who makes the UK their home? Has the Home Office consulted the National Cyber Security Centre on the threat model for fully remote testing? The reality is clear for all to see: a fully remote model cannot match the security of in-person supervised testing. Are Ministers so naive that they cannot see the disaster coming down the tracks?

I hope that much of my speech will not come as a surprise to the Minister—I have asked him enough questions on this topic, and I have been told that my “Backdoors to Britain” report, which I published in March, has been read. I am grateful for the responses to it that I received from the Department. However, given the inadequacy of the Government’s response so far, I am not satisfied that they have listened to my concerns and those of many in the country.

I hope that the Minister’s response will reflect on the seriousness of these issues and demonstrate that the Government understand the problem. The British people do not want a blame game; this problem is too important for point scoring. I recognise that the responsibility for the problems in our visa system lies with both the current and with previous Governments, but the responsibility to act now lies with current Ministers. They need to be ambitious and brave but also thorough and serious.

It is crucial that we improve the visa rules and the compliance and enforcement system. More than almost any other system, it defines who we are as a nation and what it means to be part of our community. The conversation about how we get our visa system to work in the national interest must involve all of us, regardless of our politics. I look forward to hearing contributions from colleagues from right across the political divide.