‘No plans to drop visa exemption for medics’
The Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, has sought to assuage concerns among medics after it emerged that a decision to allow many more overseas doctors and nurses to work in the NHS was only temporary.
Javid hinted at a possible U-turn on the relaxation of strict limits on medical staff allowed to come to Britain in a letter to the government’s advisers on immigration.
The letter, written in June and released by the Home Office on Thursday, said doctors and nurses would be exempt from the cap on tier 2 work visas for non-EU nationals on a temporary basis and the change would be kept under review. Senior doctors unaware that the move was temporary voiced unease, calling it “ill-judged” and saying it would exacerbate the NHS’s workforce crisis. But yesterday the home secretary said he had no plans to remove the exemption.
Javid tweeted: “In June I took action to exempt doctors and nurses from annual cap on skilled visas. Let me be clear: whilst all immigration rules kept under review, I have no plans to remove the exemption.” Before the change in June, applications made via the tier 2 route, which has an annual cap of 20,700, had been exceeding the allocation of visas.”
Javid excluded doctors and nurses from the cap after a vociferous campaign by NHS organisations and medical groups, which argued that doctors and nurses should be exempted to tackle the deepening workforce crisis in the NHS. Any return to the previous system would be unlikely to be welcomed by Matt Hancock, the health and social care secretary. He has acknowledged the extent of the NHS’s problems in recruiting and retaining key staff and made tackling it one of his key priorities.
The NHS in England has almost 10,000 vacancies for doctors, the most since records began, the regulator NHS Improvement said last month. Its chair, Dido Harding, told a conference of health service bosses this week that “the single biggest problem in the NHS at the moment is that we don’t have enough people wanting to work in it”.