THE Home Office has been slammed for repeatedly failing to assess the impact of changing a visa route for skilled workers.

A report by the government’s spending watchdog said the department does not have a full understanding of how its skilled worker visa route is operating.

The route was introduced in 2020 in a bid to attract skilled workers to Britain, but significant changes since then “have not always been based on a full assessment of potential impacts,” the National Audit Office (NAO) report said.

Entry requirements were eased for care workers in 2022 in a bid to tackle staffing shortages in the social care sector, but two years later the department tightened the rules, including a ban on dependants.

The NAO said the number of people using the route in the first three years of its existence was almost three times that which had been anticipated by the department — 931,000 visas issued rather than the expected 360,000.

It added that the impacts of changes since 2022 had not been assessed and: “As a result, it does not fully understand how the route is being used, its contribution to the economy, or impacts on skill shortages across different sectors and regions.

“Further, it does not monitor what happens to people at the end of their visa period.”

Migrant help charity the Work Rights Centre said the figures are a “shocking revelation of the scale of fraud and exploitation under the sponsorship system.”

The Home Office said: “Under the Plan for Change, we will go further and publish a white paper to restore order to our broken immigration system.”