The Department for Work and Pensions should be the first port of call for employers seeking to fill vacancies, rather than the Home Office.<\/p>
On advice from the independent Migration Advisory Committee (MAC), the Government broadened the eligibility of Skilled Worker visas from graduate jobs only to include jobs skilled to RQF level 3 (roughly equivalent to A-levels) and lowered the salary threshold to £25,600 enabling employers to recruit in more customer facing roles than was possible under the previous immigration system.<\/p>
Yet where a job needs only a short period of training or time to acquire the qualifications necessary the focus should be on recruiting from the domestic labour market, especially given the economic impact of the global pandemic means many may be looking for new employment or to change careers.<\/p>
Immigration policy cannot be seen as an alternative to improving training and career pathways or tackling issues such as unattractive pay and working conditions for those undertaking customer-facing roles. Given this we will not be introducing a general migration route allowing employers to recruit at or near the minimum wage, with no work-based training requirements, including to such roles.<\/p>
More broadly, the Government\u2019s Plan for Jobs is helping people across the country retrain, build new skills and getting back into work as part of the UK\u2019s recovery from COVID-19, with the Department for Work and Pensions, Department for Education and the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy leading work on the overall UK labour market and skills.<\/p>"} , "answeringMember" : {"_about" : "http://data.parliament.uk/members/4451", "label" : {"_value" : "Biography information for Kevin Foster"} } , "answeringMemberConstituency" : {"_value" : "Torbay"} , "answeringMemberPrinted" : {"_value" : "Kevin Foster"} , "dateOfAnswer" : {"_value" : "2021-07-06", "_datatype" : "dateTime"} , "isMinisterialCorrection" : {"_value" : "false", "_datatype" : "boolean"} , "questionFirstAnswered" : [{"_value" : "2021-07-06T15:19:18.03Z", "_datatype" : "dateTime"} ]} , "answeringDeptId" : {"_value" : "1"} , "answeringDeptShortName" : {"_value" : "Home Office"} , "answeringDeptSortName" : {"_value" : "Home Office"} , "date" : {"_value" : "2021-06-28", "_datatype" : "dateTime"} , "hansardHeading" : {"_value" : "Migrant Workers: Visas"} , "houseId" : {"_value" : "1"} , "legislature" : [{"_about" : "http://data.parliament.uk/terms/25259", "prefLabel" : {"_value" : "House of Commons"} } ], "questionText" : "To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what plans the Government has to introduce a visa scheme to allow employers to recruit overseas workers to customer-facing roles.", "registeredInterest" : {"_value" : "false", "_datatype" : "boolean"} , "tablingMember" : {"_about" : "http://data.parliament.uk/members/4663", "label" : {"_value" : "Biography information for Ben Bradley"} } , "tablingMemberConstituency" : {"_value" : "Mansfield"} , "tablingMemberPrinted" : [{"_value" : "Ben Bradley"} ], "uin" : "23310"} ], "itemsPerPage" : 10, "page" : 0, "startIndex" : 1, "totalResults" : 1, "type" : ["http://purl.org/linked-data/api/vocab#ListEndpoint", "http://purl.org/linked-data/api/vocab#Page"]} }