Coventry City Council asks for Home Office help in shops crackdown
Councillors say Skilled Worker visas are leading to a boom in dodgy retailers despite rules supposedly being tightened up.
Coventry City Council is to ask the Home Secretary to intervene over Skilled Worker visas fuelling an expansion of ‘dodgy shops’.
The authority is preparing to ramp up its clampdown on illicit activities in the high street when the new Tobacco and Vapes Act comes into force in January to ban the sale of tobacco goods, herbal smoking products and cigarette papers to anyone born on or after January 1, 2009.
The council’s Cabinet Member for Community Safety and Cohesion, Cllr John McNicholas, said he was determined to reclaim local high streets but said he needed the help of councillors, communities and the media in identifying hotspots that need to be investigated.
But members of the city council’s Scrutiny Co-ordination Committee say they believe the issuing of Skilled Worker visas to migrants – despite supposedly stricter rules – is behind the continuing proliferation of certain retail businesses.
Cllr Ed Ruane (Lab, Henley) told Cllr McNicholas: “The Home Office is still issuing Skilled Worker visas to foreign nationals to work in car washes, mini-marts and vape shops."
“How do you think you are ever going to get a grip on that until you stop the supply of what I would deem illegal working but the Home Office are actually still continuing to provide visas for?”
Cllr McNicholas responded: “We really need to use our MPs. We’ve got somewhere in Lower Stoke which uses, and has been proved to use, illegal workers themselves. So it’s going to be a continuing campaign and using the help of our MPs."
“It’s going to be at a national level, so that’s why we need to involve our MPs on these matters because they need to be aware of our determination to ensure that we, as a council, are cracking down on these illegal uses.”
Cllr Frank Beechey (Reform, Wyken) asked for the committee to approve a recommendation that Cllr McNicholas should write to the Home Secretary to ask for further changes in the granting of work visas. This was agreed.
In August, the BBC found that more than 1,900 small high street businesses nationally, including mini-marts, vape shops and car washes, were still licensed to sponsor foreign workers despite visa rules being tightened.
The rules were toughened up in July 2025 to restrict the scheme mostly to graduate-level employees earning at least £41,700.
But one year on, BBC Verify found more than 1,500 convenience stores, 150 taxi operators, 100 barber shops, and dozens of car washes and vape shops across the country are still on the register and able to sponsor people to apply for visas.
More than 100 of those businesses were added to the skilled worker sponsorship list after the rules became stricter.
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood ordered an urgent review into the presence of vape shops, barbers and car washes on the skilled worker sponsor register two months ago, following concerns over the “potential misuse of the system”. The Home Office said at the time that any businesses seeking to abuse the system would have their licences revoked.