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British parliament’s co-mmittee of public accounts has published a report indicating that UK Border Ag-ency (UKBA) has no control over thousands of wor-kers entering the country through this route.
Indian IT firms such as Tata Consultancy Services are on the UK home office list of top 10 companies using the ICT route to post employees to the UK. Others include Wipro, TechMahindra and French company Steria, which has operations in India.
Officials from TCS, Wi-pro Technologies and Steria were unavailable for comment.
Margaret Hodge, chairperson of the committee, said: “We are concerned at the lack of control over workers entering Britain through the intra-company transfer system. This allo-ws multinationals to tra-nsfer workers to the UK and is not covered by the immigration cap. Most workers enter through this route and, for instance, tens of thousands of IT workers have been brought in through intra-company transfers at a time when UK residents with IT skills are struggling to find work.”
The ICT route is not subject to the annual cap on the number of non-EU migrants. The UKBA has not got a grip on making sure that migrant workers whose visas have expired actually leave the UK.
It estimates that 181,000 such workers are staying on without permission – but it cannot verify the figure, and does not try to enforce the employer’s duty to ensure that people they bring in leave when they are required to do so.
Sam Murray, UKBA spo-kesperson in New Delhi sa-id: “The UK government has reformed the visa rou-tes for workers coming to the UK. In doing so, it liste-ned to business. The government exempted the intra-company transfers (IC-Ts) from a limit on numbers. However, it tightened ICT provisions and is monitoring its use carefully.”
The home office has now set a minimum salary requirement for this route of £40,000 (and £24,000 for those in the UK for less than a year), to better protect the interests of resident workers.
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