Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, pursuant to the Answer of 4 August 2025 to Question 62005 on Care Workers: Migrant Workers, if he will make an assessment of the potential merits of collecting data on visa status and ongoing employment in adult social care or UK residence.

Home Office immigration statistics show the numbers of Health and Care Worker visas granted under this category for the ‘Caring Personal Services’ occupation group (613), which broadly covers occupations across social care, over time, and for the specific “care workers and home carers” occupation code (6135) from the fourth quarter of 2024. Not all visa grants will result in a worker travelling to the United Kingdom.

Skills for Care collects data on the adult social care workforce from employers on behalf of the Department of Health and Social Care, with the voluntary Adult Social Care Workforce Dataset data collection. From July 2024, it added a question about the Health and Care Worker visa status of employees, supplementing existing data on nationality and, for non-UK nationals, the year of entry to the UK. However, the uncertainty of any estimate of the total number of current workers with this status would depend on how many employers have chosen to respond to that question and whether their responses could be considered representative of the workforce in its entirety. Any estimate could not be directly compared to data on visa grants from the Home Office.