Immigration minister proposes £1,000 levy on EU skilled workers

The government could impose a levy of £1,000 a year for every skilled EU worker employers in the UK recruit after Brexit to shift the focus to British workers, an immigration minister said.

Current restrictions on employers for the recruitment of workers from outside Europe should be applied to workers from within the EU as well after Brexit, according to Robert Goodwill.

“In April this year we are also bringing in the immigration skills charge for non-EEA skilled workers. If you want to recruit an Indian computer programmer on a four-year contract on top of the existing visa charges and the resident labour market test there will be a fee of £1,000 per year.

“So for a four-year contract that employer will need to pay a £4,000 immigration skills charge. That is something that currently applies to non-EU and it has been suggested to us that could be applied to EU.”

The Home Office told a House of Lords subcommittee, looking at post-Brexit migration policy, that the levy would be helpful to British workers who feel left behind by free movement of labour.

“It would be helpful to the British economy and to British workers who feel they are overlooked because of other people coming into the country getting jobs they would themselves like to get,” he said.

The Brexit result was a clear indication that voters think not enough is being done to ensure that “the skills are available for our own people” and that companies were relying too much on migrants outside Britain, the minister said.

He went on to say that an apprenticeship levy was to be introduced later this year in order to meet the government’s commitment to training more than 3m more apprentices before the 2020 election.

He did however propose that a seasonal agricultural workers scheme, which allows people to work in the UK in low skilled roles for less than six months, could be introduced after Brexit without adding towards the government’s net migration target.

“A seasonal agricultural workers scheme would not contribute to net migration because that only includes those who come to work for more than 12 months and they come for less than six months,” said Goodwill, who reaffirmed the government’s commitment to get net migration down below 100,000 post-Brexit.

He said that a pilot scheme, which allows three top British universities to make a more generous offer to overseas students, could also be introduced more widely.

Goodwill said he was not in a position to speculate on the final immigration policy but instead invited his peers to “seriously consider” including the immigration skills charge for EU skilled migrants within their inquiry report.