Judicial Review
Impact of Rule Changes
The work permit rule changes appear to have introduced an unequal pay system into workplaces, with different levels of pay for British and EU nationality workers from overseas migrant workers doing the same job (e.g. senior care worker) with the same employer. The minimum £7.02 pay level only applies to the overseas migrant workers, making them more expensive to employ.
According to the Home Office, between August 2004 and February 2008, out of the 10,500 work permits requiring renewal, more than one third were rejected – that is over 3,500 work permits were not renewed. The Home Office also said that another 8,308 senior carers were in need of further permission from February 2008 until 2012. This adds further to the number of workers who will potentially lose their jobs and their right to remain in the UK.
Many senior care workers have tried their best to satisfy the new requirements for a work permit extension by moving to other employers who will pay the £7.02 per hour. Some of them have managed to change employers before their work permits and visa expired. Some of those who arrived before December 2003 have not managed to take advantage of the concession because by the time the transitional measures were announced in January 2008, they had already been dismissed from work by their original work permit employer in 2006. Many others were not able to change employer in time and had gaps in their visa before they were able to find a new employer willing to pay the required salary.
The six-month window, in which migrants were allowed to change employers, as provided in the Home Office concession was not long enough. Others who managed to apply for an extension of their visas, within the six months concession period but got the decisions on their applications only after six months or more, started to accumulate longer gaps in their years of continuous working in their visa. Others who managed to re-apply within the six months, but were refused for one reason or another, and had to apply again, accumulated gaps of even longer than six months in their visas.
Many senior care workers, with gaps in their visas within their five years of stay in the UK, have tried to apply for indefinite leave to remain. However, they have been refused by the Home Office and were told that they should fill the gaps in their visas and re-apply when these gaps have been completed. Then again, there are some who until now have still not managed to get new employers willing to pay them £7.02 an hour and who are therefore, now here as undocumented migrants.
When migrants lose their visas, this does not automatically result in all these workers leaving the country. It almost certainly translates into a significant number of workers staying in the UK as undocumented migrants. Sadly, they become undocumented not by choice but because of misguided policies and mismanaged immigration.