Brexit Closed One Labour Route. Britain Opened Another.

Ministers keep blaming the end of the system

Listen to the language now used by ministers and the same explanation keeps returning. Britain has become too reliant on overseas workers. Employers must invest in British workers. Young people here must be given the opportunities supposedly taken by people recruited from abroad.

In May 2025, Keir Starmer said parts of the economy appeared “addicted to importing cheap labour” rather than investing in the skills of people already here. He pointed to engineering as a sector where “visas have rocketed while apprenticeships have plummeted” and presented his immigration white paper as a programme for “backing British workers”.

The same argument appeared in healthcare. Wes Streeting criticised the NHS’s over-reliance on overseas recruitment and moved towards giving UK-trained doctors priority for limited training positions. Elsewhere, employers were told they would have to demonstrate investment in the domestic workforce before retaining access to parts of the visa system.

Nor has the basic tune changed under Andy Burnham. His government has placed more emphasis on rebuilding technical education, with additional college places, apprenticeship support and a wider youth-training programme. That is more substantial than simply repeating a slogan, and it deserves to be recognised. But Burnham has not broken with the underlying political diagnosis. He has said net migration must fall further, retained the central direction of the post-2025 immigration reforms and continued to present a stronger home-grown workforce as the route away from overseas dependency.

The tone is different and the investment may be greater, but the argument still begins in the same place: Britain is recruiting too many people from abroad and must train more people at home. What remains less visible is that overseas recruitment was not something workers imposed upon Britain. It was the answer successive governments and employers chose after decades of inadequate planning, weak retention and insufficient training capacity.

There is a legitimate issue underneath this rhetoric. Britain should train more of its own nurses, doctors, engineers, electricians, builders and care workers. Young people should not find themselves locked out of skilled careers while employers search the world for somebody already qualified.

But ministers repeatedly begin the story at the wrong end.

They begin with the migrant who has arrived, the employer filling today’s vacancy or the British worker who supposedly needs to try harder. They do not begin with the state that weakened further education, allowed apprenticeship opportunities to contract, failed to plan workforces across essential industries and then created a visa system specifically designed to let approved employers recruit globally.

“British workers first” sounds like a solution because it identifies a visible competition between people. But a slogan cannot manufacture an experienced engineer, nurse, electrician or doctor. Restricting recruitment today does not repair the training that did not happen five or ten years ago.

The overseas worker is not the cause of that missing investment. They are the person recruited after the failure has already occurred.

The promise behind taking back control

Immigration was not the only reason people voted for Brexit, but it became its most powerful public language. Voters were told that leaving the European Union would allow Britain to control its borders, reduce migration and end employers’ automatic access to European workers.

Underneath that promise sat another implication: once businesses could no longer recruit so easily from Europe, they would have to employ more British workers, improve wages and invest in training.

That was the theory.

But Britain entered Brexit without the institutions required to make it happen. Further education had been weakened. Apprenticeship starts had fallen substantially from their mid-2010s level. Employers had become accustomed to recruiting experienced workers rather than carrying the cost and risk of developing them. Technical education remained fragmented across colleges, private providers, employers and constantly changing government schemes.

Britain restricted one source of labour without first constructing a credible alternative.

The work did not disappear. The hospitals, care homes, warehouses, building sites, hotels, laboratories, kitchens and engineering businesses still needed people. Employers still wanted workers who could become productive quickly. The population was still ageing. Existing workers were still retiring. Years of weak investment had not suddenly created a new generation of trained British staff.

So the government opened another route.

The new system did exactly what it was designed to do

On 1 January 2021, Britain introduced its post-Brexit points-based immigration system. European and non-European applicants would generally be treated under the same immigration rules, while approved employers could recruit eligible workers from across the world.

This was not an accidental loophole discovered after Brexit. Global recruitment was part of the replacement system’s design.

The numbers show the resulting shift. According to official HMRC analysis, between December 2020 and December 2025, payrolled employments held by EU nationals fell by 202,800, or 8 per cent. Over the same period, those held by non-EU nationals increased by 2.1 million, or 99 per cent—rising from roughly 2.1 million to roughly 4.2 million.

Mobility was replaced by sponsorship

The change was not only geographical. It also altered the relationship between workers, employers and the state.

Under European free movement, an eligible EU citizen could move to Britain and participate in its labour market without first obtaining sponsorship from a particular employer. They could change jobs, leave a bad workplace or pursue a different opportunity without normally having to make a fresh immigration application each time.

The Skilled Worker route works differently. A worker generally needs an eligible job, an approved sponsor and a certificate of sponsorship. A sponsored worker can change employers, but normally needs another qualifying job, a new certificate and a new immigration application before beginning it.

That does not make every sponsored worker powerless, and it would be wrong to suggest that they are legally trapped with one employer. But it does place immigration status much closer to the employment relationship. Losing a job can mean more than losing an income; it can begin a race to find another sponsor before the worker’s permission to remain is affected.

Brexit was presented as taking power away from employers who had become dependent on foreign labour. The replacement system instead gave approved employers a formal role in determining which overseas workers could enter and remain within the labour market.

Britain never built the workers it said it wanted

The political response to skills shortages is usually another announcement: a new levy, a new training scheme, another set of qualifications, another promise to connect employers with colleges.

But training a skilled workforce requires more than announcing places. It requires functioning colleges, experienced tutors, equipment, employers willing to provide meaningful workplace experience, and people who can afford to spend months or years learning.

Britain has increasingly shifted that burden onto individuals. Workers are told to retrain, pay for certificates, accumulate cards and licences, fund their own travel, obtain experience they cannot get without already being employed, and accept entry-level wages after spending thousands of pounds making themselves employable.

Meanwhile, an employer facing an immediate vacancy may be able to recruit someone who has already been trained elsewhere.

From the employer’s perspective, the choice can be rational. Why wait several years for a training pipeline to produce somebody when a qualified worker can be sponsored now? But what makes sense for an individual employer can produce failure at national level. Each business avoids part of the cost of training, while Britain becomes progressively more dependent upon skills financed and developed by other countries.

The state then describes the consequence as a shortage, as though it appeared naturally.

It did not. A skills shortage can be built through years of low investment, poor workforce planning, weak retention, inadequate pay and the disappearance of employers prepared to train people from the beginning.

Migration does not cause that failure. Migrants keep essential parts of the economy functioning despite it.

The workers changed, but the argument did not

Before Brexit, Polish, Romanian and other European workers were repeatedly blamed for wage pressure, housing demand and overstretched public services. The public was encouraged to believe that ending free movement would resolve those problems.

Free movement ended. European recruitment declined. But the underlying economic demand remained, so Britain recruited more intensively from India, Nigeria, the Philippines and elsewhere.

The political argument then transferred itself onto the new workforce.

The nationalities changed, but migrants were still blamed for housing shortages created by decades of inadequate construction; for public services weakened by political choices; and for low wages sustained by employer power, insecure work and poor enforcement.

This reveals the dishonesty at the centre of the debate. Britain wants the labour but resents the visibility of the people providing it. It wants nurses without international recruitment, care workers without immigration, builders without training enough apprentices and engineers without maintaining the industrial base that develops them.

It wants the output without accepting the system required to produce it.

What Brexit was sold as—and whose interests it served

Brexit was presented as a democratic revolt that would improve the lives of ordinary people. But the coalition supporting it contained groups pursuing very different objectives.

For many voters, Brexit meant immigration control, stronger borders, better wages or the recovery of a country they believed had been taken away from them. For parts of the political and financial establishment, sovereignty also meant greater freedom from European regulation, tax coordination and the future direction of transparency rules.

The Panama Papers appeared in April 2016, only months before the referendum, exposing the international architecture of offshore companies, hidden ownership and elite wealth. That same year, David Cameron was forced to explain his previous investment in his late father’s offshore fund. The European Union adopted its Anti-Tax Avoidance Directive in July 2016 and continued developing rules on beneficial ownership and cross-border tax arrangements.

None of this proves that Brexit was secretly created for one single tax purpose. Britain also introduced its own public register of company ownership and participated in international tax-information agreements. History is rarely controlled by one motive or one group.

But it would be equally naïve to pretend that tax sovereignty and deregulation were irrelevant to powerful Brexit interests. The Brexit imagined by a worker concerned about wages was not necessarily the Brexit desired by a wealthy political donor, an offshore financier or an ideologue seeking a smaller regulatory state.

Immigration provided the mass politics. Sovereignty was broad enough to contain numerous elite objectives behind it.

And when the labour consequences arrived, those at the top did not respond by rebuilding Britain’s training system. They created a different route through which employers could continue recruiting overseas.