Which Occupations Should Get Skilled Worker Visas? Informing the UK’s Visa Reform

Sam Huckstep and Helen Dempster
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Sam Huckstep: Center for Global Development

No 391, Policy Papers from Center for Global Development

Abstract: The United Kingdom’s 2025 immigration reforms will restrict access to Skilled Worker visas for “mid-skill” occupations unless they are retained on a revised shortage list. This raises an important policy question: which occupations should continue to receive access, given the limits of domestic labour supply and the effects of labour shortages on the government’s industrial strategy objectives? This paper brings together Home Office visa data, Department for Education apprenticeship data, and Migration Advisory Committee labour demand indicators to assess where Skilled Worker visas function as a critical source of new trained labour and where domestic training pipelines are least able to respond quickly to additional demand. We show that dependence on visas varies substantially across occupations and sectors. For many roles, the loss of visa access would create a significant supply shock that could not readily be offset through apprenticeships, particularly given long training lead times and weak completion rates. We further show that recent reductions in visa recruitment have not been matched by increases in apprenticeship starts, suggesting that domestic training may not automatically scale to replace visa flows, at least in the short run. In this context the government must consider its tolerance for demand destruction in the interim. We finally construct an index ranking occupations for continued visa access across multiple factors, for use as an input in visa prioritisation decisions. The strongest case for continued visa access is where occupations combine high dependence on skilled migration, constrained domestic pipelines, strong labour demand, and strategic importance. These dynamics are especially salient in parts of the clean energy workforce, where labour shortages may impede delivery of wider policy goals.

Pages: 56 pages
Date: 2026-04-15
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cgd:ppaper:391

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