Migration Advisory Committee gives details of salary requirements and temporary shortage list reviews

Following last week’s letter from the Home Secretary commissioning two reviews from the Migration Advisory Committee, one on salary requirements including discounts, and the second on the temporary shortage list, we now have the response from Professor Brian Bell giving more details of how the committee intends to proceed. The review of the temporary shortage list will include a call for evidence and “significant stakeholder engagement”.

The committee has asked for the following data to be provided by the Home Office by 8 August 2025:

• Home Office Management Information on Certificate of Sponsorships and visa applications for the Skilled Worker Route, Health and Care Route, Global Mobility Routes, Scale Up Route, and predecessors of these routes, for main applicants and dependents. This should include data from 2014 to present including SOC codes, detailed SIC codes, job titles, sponsoring organisations, sponsor licence number, salary, age, and whether any salary discounts were applied to the application.
• HMRC and Home Office linked data for those on the Skilled Worker Route, Health and Care Route, Global Business Mobility Routes for main applicants and dependents, from 2019 to the most recent available.
• Migrant Journey data for visa holders across those work routes, at individual level, from 2018 to present.
• Data for each occupation at RQF 3-5 level eligible for Skilled Worker Route and Health and Care Route on visa refusals, sponsor suspensions, sponsor revocations, asylum claims following previous work on these visas, and volume of safeguarding issues relating visa holders working in these occupations, from 2021 to present.
• Linked migration data matching main applicant to dependents where possible.

For the review of the temporary shortage list,

1. Stage 1 will include analysis and recommendations on the visa terms and conditions for occupations on the TSL. Alongside this we will provide an assessment of which RQF3-5 occupations are crucial to delivering the UK’s Industrial Strategy or critical infrastructure to take forward for further consideration in Stage 2. We aim to publish our analysis and recommendations on Stage 1 in October.

2. Stage 2 will include further analysis of the occupations we have identified as crucial to the Industrial Strategy or critical infrastructure, to assess whether they meet the criteria be on the TSL, as set out in the Immigration White Paper. This will include an assessment of shortages, the sector workforce plans, the extent to which the plans are underpinned by a skills strategy and commitment to recruit from the domestic labour market, and the risk of exploitation of workers. We aim to undertake significant stakeholder engagement with relevant sectors on their workforce plans and run a Call for Evidence as part of this stage. We will publish the MAC’s analysis and recommendations from Stage 2 within 12 months.

When the committee carried out their review of the shortage occupation list, they included consideration of the impact on people in the asylum system, as those who are granted permission to work after waiting for a year for a decision on their asylum claim were restricted to roles on that list (now the “immigration salary list”). Presumably the intention is that permission to work will be similarly restricted to the new temporary shortage list, so hopefully this issue will be revisited, if within the scope of this review.