Abstract
The United Kingdom’s employer-sponsored immigration system has long contained a structural tension between legitimate immigration control and the protection of migrant workers from labour exploitation. This tension has been particularly visible within health and adult social care, where international workers have made an indispensable contribution to the UK workforce but where serious concerns have emerged regarding exploitative recruitment, excessive fees, underpayment, inadequate working hours, threats relating to immigration status and the use of visa sponsorship as a mechanism of control. On 3 September 2026, the Home Office laid before Parliament the Statement of Changes in Immigration Rules HC 584. Among its most significant human-rights-oriented reforms is an amendment to Appendix Skilled Worker permitting Skilled Workers identified by the Home Office Competent Authorities as victims of modern slavery to work for any employer for the remainder of their existing immigration permission. This paper welcomes the reform as an important recalibration of the relationship between immigration sponsorship and labour rights. It argues that the change recognises a fundamental problem inherent in tying a migrant worker’s economic security and immigration position too closely to a particular employer. From a human rights perspective, however, the reform should be understood as an important beginning rather than a complete solution. Its effectiveness will depend on victim identification, the accessibility of the National Referral Mechanism, enforcement against abusive employers, workers’ awareness of their rights, protection against retaliation, and the development of a broader system in which immigration status cannot readily be weaponised to facilitate exploitation.
Introduction
On 3 September 2026, the UK Home Office published Statement of Changes in Immigration Rules HC 584, introducing a series of amendments to the Immigration Rules. Among these changes is a particularly significant intervention concerning Skilled Workers who have become victims of modern slavery. The reform addresses an uncomfortable vulnerability within the UK’s employer-sponsored migration architecture: the possibility that the dependency created by sponsorship may itself become an instrument through which unscrupulous employers exercise disproportionate control over migrant workers. The change is especially important when considered against the experience of international workers in health and adult social care. The British Government has itself acknowledged serious problems within this sector. In its immigration policy, the Government has referred to reports of unethical and exploitative recruitment and employment practices affecting international workers and has acknowledged that too many employers have been able to exploit international recruits. The scale of regulatory intervention is striking: the Government reported that 1,494 Skilled Worker sponsor licences, including Health and Care sponsors, were revoked in 2024, compared with 337 in 2023. Government policy has consequently acknowledged the need to give workers greater control over whom they work for and to reduce their vulnerability to exploitation.
The new rule represents an important shift in emphasis. It does not abolish employer sponsorship. Nor does it give all sponsored workers an unrestricted right to change employers. Rather, it creates a specific protection for those Skilled Workers whom the Home Office’s Competent Authorities identify as victims of modern slavery. Such individuals will be permitted to work for any employer for the remaining duration of their existing permission. From a human rights perspective, the significance of this reform extends considerably beyond immigration administration. It concerns dignity, autonomy, freedom from forced labour, access to effective protection and the ability of migrant workers to escape exploitative employment without immediately jeopardising their immigration position. This paper argues that the reform should therefore be welcomed. It begins to confront what may be described as the sponsorship dependency problem: circumstances in which an employer’s control over employment becomes intertwined with a migrant worker’s ability to remain lawfully and economically secure in the United Kingdom. At the same time, the reform leaves important questions unresolved. Protection only after formal identification as a victim of modern slavery may be too late for workers experiencing serious exploitation that has not yet crossed, or cannot readily be proved to have crossed, the modern-slavery threshold.
The 3 September 2026 Reform
The Home Office explains the rationale for the reform with unusual clarity. Under the conventional Skilled Worker model, an individual is granted permission to work in a particular sponsored job. Consequently, a worker generally cannot simply abandon the sponsored employment and commence unrestricted employment elsewhere. The explanatory memorandum accompanying HC 584 states: “These changes lift that restriction for Skilled Workers who are identified by the Home Office Competent Authorities as victims of modern slavery, allowing them to work for any employer for the remaining duration of their existing permission.” The Home Office explains that the purpose is both to incentivise victims to come forward and to protect workers against individuals who attempt to “weaponise the sponsorship system” to exploit vulnerable employees. That language is important. It constitutes institutional recognition that immigration sponsorship can, in particular circumstances, become part of the machinery of exploitation rather than merely an administrative mechanism regulating labour migration. The amendment was laid before Parliament on 3 September 2026. It is important, however, to distinguish announcement from commencement: according to the explanatory memorandum, the relevant changes are due to take effect on 8 October 2026.
The Certificate of Sponsorship and the Problem of Dependency
A Certificate of Sponsorship (CoS) is not itself a visa. It is an electronic sponsorship record issued through an authorised sponsor and used by a migrant worker to support an application under a sponsored immigration route. Nevertheless, in practical terms, the employment relationship underlying sponsorship may have enormous implications for the worker’s continued ability to live and work in the United Kingdom. There is nothing inherently abusive about employer sponsorship. Thousands of responsible employers use the system legitimately, and it would be inappropriate to characterise the health and care sector as a whole by the misconduct of exploitative operators. The human rights concern arises where immigration dependency changes the bargaining relationship between employer and employee. An ordinary worker, confronted with unacceptable conditions, may, at least in theory, resign and seek alternative employment. For a sponsored migrant worker, the calculation can be substantially more complicated. Losing sponsored employment may have immigration consequences. Where the worker has incurred substantial debts to migrate, relocated a family, paid recruitment costs or depends entirely upon employment income, the practical capacity to challenge an employer may be severely diminished. The result can be a profound asymmetry of bargaining power. In extreme circumstances, an unscrupulous employer can effectively communicate that if you challenge these conditions, refuse these demands, or leave this employment, your ability to remain in the United Kingdom may be endangered. It is precisely here that an immigration mechanism risks becoming an instrument of coercion. The September 2026 reform is significant because it begins to sever that connection for recognised victims of modern slavery.
Why the Health and Social Care Sector Matters
The reform must also be understood in light of the particular experience of international recruitment in health and social care. International workers have made an enormous contribution to the delivery of health and social care in Britain. The exploitation experienced by some migrant workers should therefore not obscure their economic and social contribution. Indeed, effective protection against exploitation is, in part, a recognition of that contribution. Government evidence nevertheless demonstrates substantial problems in adult social care. In 2025, the Government acknowledged that overseas care workers had, in some cases, arrived in Britain burdened with debt, been treated unfairly, or discovered that jobs they had been promised did not actually exist. It further reported that more than 470 care providers had had their sponsorship licences suspended since 2022. More recently, the Government’s 2026–27 international recruitment regional fund guidance acknowledges “large-scale non-compliance with the immigration rules in the adult social care sector, including exploitation,” resulting in sponsor licence revocations and the displacement of thousands of international care workers. Parliamentary scrutiny has raised similar concerns. The Government has acknowledged allegations that Health and Care Worker visa holders are required to make additional payments to employers to maintain their sponsorship. By January 2026, the Home Office reported that more than 1,000 sponsor licences had been revoked for sponsors operating in social care since care workers were brought into the Health and Care Worker route. These are not peripheral concerns. They demonstrate why the intersection between immigration control and employment regulation deserves sustained human rights scrutiny.
Sponsorship as a Potential Instrument of Coercion
The most significant conceptual development in the new Home Office position is the recognition that sponsorship can be “weaponised”. That description should be taken seriously. Modern slavery is rarely sustained exclusively through physical confinement. Contemporary exploitation may involve economic pressure, debt, deception, threats, confiscation of documents, dependency, abuse of vulnerability and threats concerning a person’s immigration status. For a sponsored migrant, immigration dependency may amplify each of these factors. Consider a worker who has borrowed significant money to travel to Britain after being promised full-time employment. Upon arrival, the worker discovers that substantially fewer hours are available than promised. The worker may nevertheless have accommodation costs, debts and financial responsibilities abroad. If that worker understands that leaving the employer may jeopardise sponsorship, the formal freedom to resign may bear little resemblance to meaningful economic freedom. Human rights analysis must therefore look beyond the formal employment contract and examine the substantive distribution of power. The critical question is not simply whether the worker technically possesses the right to resign. It is whether the institutional arrangements surrounding the employment relationship create conditions in which exercising that right carries such serious consequences that exploitation becomes considerably easier.
Freedom from Slavery, Servitude and Forced Labour
The reform has obvious significance for the prohibition of slavery and forced labour. Article 4 of the European Convention on Human Rights prohibits slavery and servitude and, subject to specified exceptions, forced or compulsory labour. The prohibition imposes important positive obligations upon states in circumstances involving trafficking and serious exploitation. The UK’s domestic framework is also shaped by the Modern Slavery Act 2015 and the National Referral Mechanism, through which potential victims of modern slavery are identified and supported. The new immigration provision strengthens this architecture by addressing one of the practical obstacles to escaping exploitation: employment dependency. Protection against modern slavery cannot operate effectively if a worker must choose between escaping an exploitative employment relationship and retaining economic and immigration security. A rights-protective system must make exit realistically possible. The new rule moves UK immigration policy closer to that principle.
Human Dignity and the Right to Decent Working Conditions
The reform also engages a wider conception of human dignity. Human beings should never become commodities within an immigration sponsorship market. A Certificate of Sponsorship cannot ethically or legally be understood as conferring ownership-like control over a worker. The employer sponsors a job for immigration purposes; it does not acquire control over the worker as a person. That distinction sounds obvious, but it has profound practical implications. Migrant workers retain their employment rights and fundamental human rights regardless of their route of entry. Their nationality and dependence on sponsorship cannot justify unpaid wages, unlawful deductions, coercive working practices, intimidation, or degrading treatment. International human rights law reinforces these principles. Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognises the right to work, free choice of employment and just and favourable conditions of work. The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights similarly recognises the right to just and favourable conditions of work. The ability of a recognised victim of modern slavery to work for another employer therefore promotes more than labour mobility. It restores a measure of personal autonomy.
The Importance of Removing the “Choose Your Job or Your Visa” Dilemma
One of the strongest aspects of the reform is its potential to alter the psychology of exploitation. An abusive sponsorship arrangement may thrive upon fear. A worker may believe that complaining to regulators, contacting the police, refusing excessive demands or leaving the employer will result in unemployment and ultimately removal from the United Kingdom. Such perceptions create powerful incentives for silence. The new rule introduces an important counter-message: where exploitation reaches the level of modern slavery, and the worker is identified accordingly, escaping the employer does not necessarily mean losing the ability to work. This can strengthen reporting. It can improve cooperation with law-enforcement authorities. It can reduce the leverage that exploitative employers have. Most importantly, it can transfer practical power from the sponsor to the worker. The Home Office itself explicitly states that the reform is intended to incentivise victims to come forward early. This preventive dimension is potentially as important as the remedial dimension.
A Welcome Reform, but a Narrow Gateway
Despite its considerable merits, the reform has an important limitation: the protection is triggered by identification as a victim of modern slavery by the Home Office Competent Authorities. This creates a threshold problem. There is a spectrum of labour exploitation. At one end are ordinary employment disputes. At the other end are slavery, servitude, forced labour and trafficking. Between these points may exist extremely serious exploitation that makes a worker vulnerable but does not necessarily result in recognition as a modern-slavery victim. Examples may include systematic underpayment, unlawful deductions, deliberately insufficient working hours, abusive accommodation arrangements, excessive recruitment charges, threats of dismissal, discriminatory treatment and intimidation connected to sponsorship. Such conduct can be profoundly harmful without necessarily producing an immediate positive modern-slavery determination. The Government must therefore ensure that the reform does not create a binary system in which a worker must effectively demonstrate modern slavery before meaningful immigration flexibility becomes available.
The National Referral Mechanism and the Problem of Delay
A second concern relates to the National Referral Mechanism itself. Government policy has previously recognised substantial delays in modern-slavery decision-making. The immigration White Paper reported that the average time for a conclusive grounds decision increased from 453 days in the first quarter of 2020 to 1,021 days in the third quarter of 2024. This creates an obvious human rights question: what happens to the worker while victim status is being determined? A right that becomes effective only after an exceptionally lengthy administrative process may provide inadequate protection at the moment when the worker is most vulnerable. The success of the September 2026 reform will therefore depend upon the procedural architecture surrounding identification. Potential victims need accessible reporting channels, rapid preliminary protection, accurate information and safeguards against employer retaliation. Freedom from exploitation must operate in real time rather than retrospectively.
Enforcement Must Focus on Employers, Not Merely Victims
Another welcome feature of the evolving policy landscape is the increasing focus on sponsor accountability. Historically, immigration enforcement has often concentrated overwhelmingly on migrants’ compliance with immigration conditions. Yet sponsorship is a reciprocal regulatory arrangement. Employers obtain substantial privileges by being authorised to sponsor overseas workers and must therefore comply rigorously with their legal responsibilities. Government action demonstrates increasing recognition of this principle. The substantial number of sponsor-licence revocations in recent years indicates heightened enforcement. However, licence revocation alone does not necessarily provide justice to workers. An employer may lose the ability to sponsor future migrants while existing workers remain financially damaged, indebted or psychologically traumatised. An effective human-rights framework should therefore combine immigration enforcement with employment-law enforcement, criminal investigation where appropriate, recovery of unpaid wages, protection from retaliation and effective access to remedies. Accountability must follow the perpetrator of exploitation rather than the immigration status of the victim.
The Need to Protect Whistleblowers
The reform also presents an opportunity to strengthen whistleblower protection. Workers are often best placed to expose sponsorship abuse. Yet they may simultaneously be the people with the greatest reason to fear reporting it. The Government should therefore ensure that migrant workers can report suspected exploitation confidentially and without creating an immediate threat to their immigration position. Information-sharing between labour enforcement and immigration authorities requires particularly careful safeguards. Where workers perceive reporting mechanisms principally as immigration-enforcement mechanisms, serious exploitation may remain hidden. Trust is therefore a regulatory resource. Workers who believe that authorities will protect them are more likely to report abuse. Workers who fear that reporting will produce immigration consequences are more likely to remain silent.
From Employer Dependency to Worker Mobility
The September reform also raises a broader policy question: should greater employment mobility eventually be extended beyond formally recognised modern-slavery victims? The Government’s immigration White Paper had already contemplated making it easier for sponsored workers to move between licensed sponsors. The logic is compelling. Labour mobility itself can be an anti-exploitation safeguard. Where an employer knows that a worker can realistically leave for another compliant sponsor, the employer has stronger incentives to maintain lawful wages and acceptable working conditions. Conversely, where the worker’s immigration position creates substantial barriers to leaving, ordinary labour-market discipline is weakened. This does not require abandoning sponsorship. Rather, sponsorship could evolve from a model of employer dependency towards a model of regulated sectoral mobility. Workers could, for example, be permitted to move more easily between authorised employers within the same occupation or sector without having to restart the immigration process effectively. Such a model could preserve immigration control while reducing individual employers’ capacity to exercise disproportionate power.
The Reform and the Contribution of International Skilled Workers
There is also a wider normative reason to welcome the reform. International skilled workers are not simply units of labour imported to fill vacancies. They are rights-bearing individuals who contribute professionally, economically and socially to the United Kingdom. This is particularly evident in healthcare and social care, where international workers have supported services experiencing longstanding recruitment and retention pressures. A sustainable immigration system must therefore combine border control with dignity at work. The protection of migrant workers should not be framed as being in tension with the interests of British workers. Exploitative employment practices ultimately undermine labour market standards. Employers able to underpay or intimidate migrant workers obtain an unfair competitive advantage over responsible employers and place downward pressure on employment conditions generally. Protecting migrant workers is therefore part of protecting the integrity of the labour market itself.
Recommendations
The new rule is an important step, but its potential should be consolidated through a broader rights-based framework.
First, the Government should ensure that workers receive clear information, before arrival and during employment, explaining that sponsorship does not remove their employment rights and identifying confidential mechanisms for reporting abuse.
Second, there should be rapid interim protection for workers referred into the National Referral Mechanism so that lengthy decision-making does not leave potential victims dependent upon alleged exploiters.
Third, the Home Office should continue strengthening scrutiny of sponsors, particularly in sectors presenting elevated risks of labour exploitation.
Fourth, labour regulators, police, local authorities, the Home Office and sector regulators should develop effective information-sharing mechanisms while ensuring that victims are not discouraged from reporting exploitation by fear of immigration enforcement.
Fifth, workers whose sponsors lose their licences should receive meaningful assistance in finding alternative lawful employment.
Sixth, consideration should be given to permitting greater mobility between licensed sponsors more generally, particularly where credible evidence of serious employment abuse exists even if the worker has not yet been formally recognised as a victim of modern slavery.
Seventh, sanctions against exploitative sponsors should be accompanied by effective mechanisms through which workers can recover unpaid wages, unlawful deductions and other losses.
Finally, implementation should be independently monitored. Data should be published on the number of workers benefiting from the new provision, the sectors involved, processing times, sponsor enforcement actions, and subsequent employment outcomes.
Conclusion: A Significant Human Rights Correction
The Home Office’s 3 September 2026 amendment to Appendix Skilled Worker deserves recognition as an important and progressive development in the protection of migrant workers. For too long, one of the fundamental vulnerabilities in employer-sponsored migration has been the concentration of power that arises when a worker’s employment, livelihood, and immigration security are closely tied to a single sponsor. Most employers exercise sponsorship responsibilities properly. Yet where employers are abusive, that dependency can become extraordinarily dangerous. The Government’s explicit recognition that some actors may “weaponise the sponsorship system” is therefore significant. By allowing Skilled Workers identified as victims of modern slavery to work for any employer for the remainder of their existing permission, the new rule begins to break the relationship between immigration dependency and exploitative control. For international skilled workers, particularly those who have experienced exploitation within health and social care, this represents a meaningful improvement. It offers greater autonomy, greater security and, critically, a more realistic possibility of walking away from an exploitative employer without simultaneously sacrificing the ability to earn a livelihood. Yet the reform should be the beginning rather than the endpoint. Human rights protection should ideally intervene before exploitation becomes slavery. The longer-term objective must consequently be an immigration and labour-regulation system in which no worker believes that tolerating abuse is the price of retaining immigration status. A Certificate of Sponsorship must never become a certificate of control. The United Kingdom is entitled to regulate labour migration and to require compliance with immigration rules. But immigration control and human rights protection are not mutually exclusive objectives. A legitimate sponsorship system must combine both. The measure announced on 3 September 2026 demonstrates that this balance is possible. Properly implemented, it can make international skilled workers safer, encourage victims to report exploitation, weaken the leverage of unscrupulous sponsors and improve standards among employers. Its central principle should now inform the next stage of reform: immigration status must never be capable of being weaponised to compel a person to endure exploitation.
Dr Nelson A. Agbor AFHEA
Certified Human Rights Consultant
V. Lecturer @Birmingham City University.
