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The Home Office's statement:

On 19 February, we intend to lay Immigration Rules which will remove the right for care workers and senior care workers to bring dependants, which will come into force on 11 March 2024. The rules will ensure that care providers in England will only be able to sponsor migrant workers if they are undertaking activities regulated by the Care Quality Commission (CQC). This will help tackle the abuse of the Health and Care Visa route that we have seen and ensure that those coming through this route genuinely support the social care system.

• On 14 March, we intend to lay Immigration Rules to increase the earnings thresholds for those arriving on the Skilled Worker route, with the minimum threshold rising by 48% from £26,200 to £38,700. These changes will come into force from 4 April and will ensure that our immigration system is focused on attracting skilled, highly paid talent from around the world. Those coming on the Health and Care Visa route will be exempted from this specific threshold so we can continue to bring the healthcare workers that our care sector and NHS need. We are also exempting workers on national payscale occupations.
• On 17 January we commissioned the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) to carry out a rapid review of the Shortage Occupation List to inform which occupations should be temporarily added to an Immigration Salary List from early April. The Immigration Rules we intend to lay on 14 March will remove the 20% going rate discount for occupations on the Shortage Occupation List, as well as temporarily add any occupations as recommended by the MAC to the new Immigration Salary List.
• On Family visas, we will bring this in line with the new minimum general salary threshold for a Skilled Worker of £38,700. We will raise the minimum income for Family visas incrementally, in stages, to give predictability to families. The Immigration Rules we intend to lay on 14 March will set out that from 11 April we will raise the threshold to £29,000 - that is the 25th percentile of earnings for jobs which are eligible for Skilled Worker visas. We will incrementally increase the threshold to the 40th percentile (currently £34,500), and finally to the 50th percentile (currently £38,700, and the level at which the General Skilled Worker threshold is set) by early 2025.