Mini-cab firms qualify to bring in migrants under ‘Skilled Workers’ scheme

EXCL:  Home Office licenses 118,000 firms as ‘sponsors of skilled workers’ into the UK

List includes hundreds of halal and kebab shops, cafes, corner shops, mini-cab firms, and barbers

28,000 (80%) of all applications were approved in Starmer’s first year in power

With pro-immigration organisations saying the UK needs to import ‘skilled workers’ to keep the country running, Stand for Our Sovereignty and Facts4EU can reveal the truth behind the Home Office’s scheme to approve dubious firms as ‘licensed sponsors’ of migrants entering the UK.

The research teams at Stand for Our Sovereignty and Brexit Facts4EU have once again delved deeply into Home Office records and have uncovered evidence of what appears to be widescale abuse of the UK’s generosity.  This time it relates to a perfectly legal way for migrants to enter the UK in their thousands, as so-called ‘skilled workers’.

1.  The quadrupling in five years of the number of registered ‘sponsoring organisations’

Five years ago, the total number of organisations officially registered with the Home Office was c. 30,000. Since then, the rise has been inexorable. Today there are 118,000 of them, of all kinds. To be clear, these are organisations approved by the Home Office as sponsors of ‘skilled workers’, who then get visas to enter the country perfectly legally.

The extent to which these migrants are checked up on is not reported in any of the reports we were able to find, although of course there is an enforcement arm so it is possible that such records exist.  Below is a chart showing the growth in numbers. These are the number of approved organisations not the number of migrants they have sponsored.

Click chart to enlarge

2.  Number of new applications per quarter to become a ‘registered sponsor’ of a ‘skilled worker’

First 12 months under Starmer Government

3.  Approval rate for new applications

First 12 months under Starmer Government

As can be seen, there is an almost 80% chance of being approved as a Home Office registered sponsor of skilled workers.

4.  Unusual sponsoring organisations for ‘skilled workers’

Data correct as at October 2025

Ons of the spreadsheets the Home Office keeps but does not publish as part of its usual quarterly output is a list of the 118,000 organisations it has approved as sponsors of skilled workers.

The Stand for Our Sovereignty’s and Facts4EU team’s analysis included a review of this very long list. We found some unusual looking names, and started counting names like these. Our only caveat is that it is of course possible that a company called ABC Mini-Cabs Ltd is not in fact a business providing mini-cabs for short journeys. We have proceeded on the assumption, however, that there is a reasonable chance that this might indeed be their form of business.

With that caveat in mind, here are the approximate numbers we found.

Click chart to enlarge

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OBSERVATIONS

This report does of course raise many questions. For example, who decides what is a ‘skilled worker’? Who decides which workers the country is in desperate need of? If it turns out that the country is dire need of ‘Rear-Reversing Sprocket Joint Shunters & Fitters’, are visas simply issued or does anyone communicate that there’s clearly a training need for such individuals?

A good example of the latter are nurses. Some years ago it was decided by someone that nursing should become a degree-only profession. Even nurses with many years’ experience found their promotion line blocked (or at least seriously impaired) if they did not have a degree, regardless of whether their patients thought they were the best nurse they had ever had.

Cue an influx of nurses from abroad, many of inferior standard in terms of nursing skills and a great many of whom were almost impossible to understand, as their English was so poor.