Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment she has made of the effect of recent changes to immigration rules on nurse staffing levels in the independent and private sectors.

Following advice from the independent Migration Advisory Committee, the Government introduced an annual limit on Tier 2, the skilled work route, in 2011. In 2012 the Government announced that from 6 April 2016 Tier 2 migrants who apply for settlement in the UK will be required to meet a minimum annual salary requirement of £35,000.

The Home Office published full impact assessments on these changes when the rules were laid before Parliament. The impact assessments are available on the gov.uk website as follows:

Annual limit: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/migration-permanent-limit-tier-1-and-tier-2-impact-assessment

Settlement: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/changes-affecting-employment-related-settlement-tier-5-and-overseas-domestic-workers

Under the annual limit, NHS trusts have been given more than 1,400 Tier 2 certificates of sponsorship for nurses since April this year but over 600 of the places allocated to them in April and May this year have been returned unused.