Migrant Workers: Vetting
The question
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps her Department is taking to strengthen the requirements for overseas criminal record checks for migrant care workers applying for sponsorship under the Health and Care Worker visa route.
Answered by Mike Tapp
We take the issue of preventing foreign criminals entering the UK extremely seriously.
Overseas criminal record certificates are one of a number of checks undertaken to establish whether a person has committed any offences overseas.
Visa applicants coming here to work in education, health and social care sectors must provide a criminal record certificate from any country they have lived for 12 months or more in the past 10 years. This continues to be considered a fair balance between capturing any significant and recent criminal history, and what is available from some territories’ criminal record data systems.
The requirement strengthens the existing process of checks enabling us to establish whether the person has committed any offences overseas, including standard self-declaration of any criminal history as part of an application to come to the UK.
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