One Nigerian woman claims to have paid a “agent” £10,000 for a skilled worker visa with the promise of employment in the UK, only to discover that the position was unfilled.
This was part of a detailed investigation by Sky News, with Blessing, not her real name, revealing that she arrived in the UK three months ago. She says she paid someone she calls an “agent” in Nigeria £10,000 to arrange a job as a carer in the UK.
But when she got here she found there was no work for her.
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Her story is part of a wider problem, revealed in a Sky News investigation this year showing how the skilled worker visa system is being abused with middlemen allegedly being paid huge sums of money to arrange jobs in the UK as carers that do not exist.
Many people who are jobless are struggling to make ends meet, using food banks and even sleeping on the streets.
Today, Blessing is dependent on charity.
She receives a shopping bag of essentials from a food bank in a Nigerian Community Centre in Greater Manchester; the shelves and crates are stocked with contributions of bread, cereal, tinned tomatoes, and staples from Africa like palm oil and beans.
Blessing is scared to contact the British company which sponsored her for fear of repercussions – but showed her passport and other documents supporting her account of what happened.
I ask her why she didn’t make the application herself. With some irony, she says: “I would have done it myself but there are so many frauds on the internet [in Nigeria] you don’t know what’s real.”
Blessing says she knows others who have skilled worker visas only to get here and find there’s no work waiting for them.
Mary Adekugbe, the founder of the Nigerian Community Centre in Rochdale, says those on skilled worker visas now needing support is a big issue that is increasing her workload – something she describes as “shameful”.
About 15 of the 35-40 people who generally come to the weekly food bank have skilled worker visas, she says.
“We are overwhelmed,” she says. “People are desperate. It’s so worrying.”
In the 12 months to March 2023, 170,993 skilled worker visas have been awarded. In the health and care sector alone, grants have increased over two and a half times and represent over half of all work visas issued in the same period.
On the job with the lowest entry requirement – care workers and home carers – 40,416 people were awarded visas in the year to March 2023.
