MAC report on engineering and IT sectors finds immigration is as crucial as training

29 May 2025

The Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) has published its long-awaited report commissioned by Home Secretary Yvette Cooper on immigration use by the engineering and IT sectors. One of Yvette Cooper’s first actions as Home Secretary was to commission the independent body last August to examine the sectors’ “reliance on international recruitment” and how they might “reflect weaknesses in the labour market including persistent skills shortages in the UK.”

The Home Secretary insisted that as well as reducing immigration, the new government’s objectives would be for an evidence-based and more joined up approach to the labour market by linking immigration with skills policy. She asked the Committee’s academics to report on why Information Technology, Telecommunications and Engineering Professionals are hired from abroad and how to rely on training the British workforce instead as part of a programme of reports on key sectors of the UK’s labour market where there is a reliance on international workers.

A letter accompanying the publication of the report today intimates that the Home Office asked for it to be delayed until after the government’s Immigration White Paper and reading the 101 page report it is understandable why. The MAC reaches rather different conclusions to the premises of the government’s Immigration White Paper published just over a fortnight before. UK immigration priorities set out in the White Paper are aimed at discouraging visas for work at skillsets below degree level (RQF6), reducing immigration numbers in general and setting up systems to link work migration with training the British workforce to perform the same roles.

It’s not a straight choice between immigration and training

The MAC report on Professionals in IT and Engineering warns “about the idea of directly linking immigration access to skills investment. At either firm or sector level, this would not be a simple task. At firm-level, it risks creating complexity, enforcement challenges and gaming. At a sector-level it may not create a sufficient incentive for employers to increase their investment in domestic training.”

The MAC also does not recommend the return of the Resident Labour Market Test (RLMT) in these two sectors – whereby sponsors had to demonstrate that they had first tried to advertise positions locally before hiring from abroad – as it found it to be an ineffective bureaucratic burden.

The authors explain that the UK  does not have a large population of unemployed highly skilled workers ready to fill high tech skills gaps. Expanding degree courses to fill industries’ skills needs won’t fill vacancies now, only in three to four years’ time.

With some notable exceptions from big corporations, skills training by businesses in these sectors has fallen off in recent years. Yet the Committee explains how training a domestic workforce in the skills the economy will need tomorrow and hiring the right candidate for a highly technical job that needs to be filled right now from wherever they may be in the world are not interchangeable.

One is not necessarily a substitute for the other.

Training, education and diversity require investment

Finding the skillsets to develop rapidly-developing areas of technology such as Artificial Intelligence or new solutions to meet Net Zero targets will involve both investing in training the UK workforce to meet these new challenges as well as recruiting the necessary talent from around the world.

Improving domestic skillsets will not necessarily reduce the demand for work visas.

The MAC finds that hurdles to training domestic talent aren’t due to industry “reliance” on immigration. Rather, engineering and IT are expensive courses for universities and further education institutions to run and teachers are paid more working in the fields.

The report pulls no punches when it comes to the inadequacy of STEM education funding: “Universities lose money on average teaching UK undergraduates, but they lose relatively more teaching high-cost STEM subjects. FE has been starved of money over the last few decades, and again the costs of providing courses outstrips the revenue they receive.” The White Paper sets out plans to further discourage international students and force universities to pay a levy on income from international students (to be “reinvested in skills”) which would exacerbate universities’ problems unless tuition fees are raised for students.

A gender imbalance and problems with diversity persist in the sectors examined, despite initiatives to increase diversity such as (STEM) pathways and industry placement schemes. These require continued funding.

Immigration is proportionate and necessary for IT and Engineering

The MAC report warns about the wider consequences if there were measures to reduce work visas for these sectors crucial to UK industrial strategy, including the economic drag to these areas of high growth.

“From an immigration perspective, we have not found major problems to be fixed,” the MAC makes clear in its accompanying letter to the Home Secretary.

The report finds no evidence of overreliance on immigration by the sector. On the contrary, “usage of the immigration system is broadly proportionate to the size of the IT and Engineering sectors, within the rules and clearly responding to demand in the UK labour market.”

The MAC adds: “migrants in these occupations have a positive fiscal impact on the UK. Regardless of whether there are domestic skills shortages, the UK benefits from healthy growth in IT and Engineering, which contribute to productivity across other sectors and the development of high-skilled, high-wage economy.”

While both engineering and the tech sector rely on recruiting talent from abroad, the MAC remind the government that the government itself is by far the largest international recruiter: “IT has substantially higher visa usage than Engineering (around 9% and 3% of all Skilled Worker visas respectively), yet both are substantially below other (often largely publicly funded) groups such as nursing and other health professionals.”

Salary thresholds to sponsor Skilled Workers are already high

Interestingly, the MAC remain sceptical about the workability of different regional immigration approaches to even up the playing field for employers hiring from abroad that may not be able to afford to pay London wages.

On the other hand, the report warns that increasing the minimum going rate salary to sponsor Skilled Workers to the fiftieth percentile of wages across the country in April 2024 has made recruiting talent from abroad very difficult for regional businesses in areas paying lower salaries.

The report concludes that this requires further analysis and suggests it will inform a review of the entire question of minimum salary thresholds, exceptions and discounts to sponsor talent from abroad that is another of the measures trailed in the government’s recent Immigration White Paper.

Worryingly, the White Paper intimates that the current minimum salary threshold to sponsor Skilled Workers will be raised further. Though from the conclusions of this report and others, I would find it very unlikely that the MAC would recommend raising this bar even higher.

This review has also highlighted that some of the most acute shortages lie in technical occupations below graduate level. These are the skillsets that the recent Immigration White Paper suggests will be removed from the Skilled Worker visas: 171 jobs at the skill levels of RQF3-5. Some of these will be able to be hired on a new Temporary Shortage List.

Going forward

This report is a refreshing read, finding immigration use proportionate to the fast growth of the areas, explaining that increasing the level of skills in the domestic labour pool does not guarantee a reduction in migration, and that both approaches are complementary.

Simply maintaining employment at current levels in these sectors would not be sufficient to facilitate the government’s growth ambitions in line with the industrial strategy.

Existing projections indicate both sectors are expected to grow substantially between now and 2035. The Skills Imperative’s baseline estimates suggest that both the IT and Engineering professional occupations could grow by almost 11% over this period. This is the same as the growth projected for professional occupations as a whole but is almost 7 percentage points greater than the growth in employment expected across the UK economy. Alternative modelling scenarios also suggest growth in both sectors could be substantially higher than this at around 22% between 2025 and 2035.

This report makes a good case for the continued need of both training strategies and immigration for the UK’s high tech industries.

I would hope that to mitigate measures to reduce immigration in the White Paper, organisations liaise with sectoral bodies, lobby for skillsets that may be below RQF6 but are necessary for growth (for examples welders and precision instrument makers) to be given a reprieve in the proposed Temporary Shortage List so that they can still be recruited from abroad. Industrial bodies should help put together the workforce strategies necessary to protect themselves and their sectors.

Compliance with the ever-changing UK immigration rules will be more important than ever, as the White Paper intimates innovative penalties and sanctions for organisations failing on compliance with sponsor duties and visa conditions. We can always assist with audits and advice on the ever-changing regimes for sponsorship and right to work compliance.