Home Office job rules criticised

EARLIER THIS WEEK the Home Office announced a number of measures that it thinks will help UK-based workers get jobs before they end up being given to workers abroad.

The proposals have not exactly been welcomed with open arms by a UK staffing organisation that has been fielding a lot of complaints on behalf of tech workers.

The Home Office has spent a couple of weeks thinking about some recommendations made to it by the Migration Advisory Committee, a group that spent a few months thinking about how best to ensure UK workers get first dibs on UK jobs.

The MAC decided that rules surrounding intra-company transfers - where an overseas firm can fill UK vacancies with oversea staff without going through the normal visa process - need to be tightened up. Which makes us wonder who decided to create them in the first place? Ah, the Home Office was it? And just last year you say? Hmmmm.

This month the Home Office decided that, in order to make sure that UK workers have an opportunity to compete for the same jobs as people thousands of miles away, openings should be advertised in job centres for four weeks, an extension of two weeks over the previous two weeks.

"This will ensure that British workers are not only first in line for jobs but also now have more time in which to apply," it said.

The Home Office also decided that the minimum salary that will allow an individual to qualify as a skilled worker and be eligible to work in the UK will also rise from £17,000 to £20,000. It also plans to extend the qualifying period for overseas workers who want to transfer to work at the UK arm of their company from just six months to a year.

Sounds fair? Not to APSCo, the Association of Professional Staffing Companies, which said that the rule changes - which look to be slight even to us - will do "nothing at all" to stem the problem of intra-company transfers.

"These changes will do very little to slow the influx of non-EU IT workers coming to the UK", railed Ann Swain, Chief Executive of APSCo. "While the intra-company transfer system might not be exploited in the financial and legal sectors, there is clear evidence that it is being exploited in the IT sector. The Government has failed to take this message on board. These changes are largely cosmetic and may actually accelerate the use of non-EU workers in the UK."

Swain said that advertising highly-skilled technical positions in job centres was highly inappropriate and suggested that employers should be coerced into working with professional UK staffing organisations as they seek to fill roles.

We'll give it a couple of weeks and see if the Government changes its mind again. In the meantime, the message seems to be that any highly skilled but out of work IT workers should go down to the job centre. µ