Who Really Runs Britain's Low-Skilled Visa Sponsors?

What is the Boriswave?

In 2021, the UK government quietly dismantled one of the last barriers to mass low-skilled immigration. Under Boris Johnson, the definition of "skilled work" within the points-based visa system was broadened so dramatically that takeaway shops, vape stores, and nail bars could suddenly sponsor overseas workers. The floodgates opened. Hundreds of thousands of low-skilled workers poured in, and the wave shows no sign of stopping. It's now known as The Boriswave.

We wanted to know: who is actually behind this? Who runs the businesses bringing in these workers? So we cross-referenced the full UK visa sponsor register against Companies House records — matching 99.2% of all low-skilled sponsors to their directors.

The headline number: 42% of low-skilled visa sponsors have at least one non-British director. These aren't British businesses struggling to find local workers. They're foreign-run operations using the visa system to bring in their own.

Massively overrepresented

Some nationalities appear as directors of low-skilled visa sponsors far out of proportion to their presence in the UK population. The numbers aren't even close.

To put this in context: a British-born person has roughly 3.9 directorships per 10,000 people in low-skilled visa sponsors. A Sri Lankan-born person in the UK has 57 per 10,000 — nearly 15 times the British rate. Pakistanis are at 38 per 10,000, Indians at 34. These aren't small statistical wobbles. These are orders of magnitude.

South Asians overall — Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and Sri Lankan nationals — make up just 2.8% of the UK population but hold 18.4% of all low-skilled sponsor directorships. That's a 6.6x overrepresentation.

Indian and Pakistani nationals alone hold 5,398 director positions across low-skilled sponsors. Add Bangladeshi and Sri Lankan nationals and the total reaches 7,012 — a third of all non-British directors in the sector.

It looks different sector by sector

The concentration varies sharply depending on the type of business. Convenience stores and corner shops are overwhelmingly South Asian-run. Fast food is dominated by Pakistani directors. Hospitality is the sole category where a Western European nationality leads.

The standout patterns:

• Convenience stores have the sharpest ethnic concentration — 11.5% of all directors are Indian, 6.4% Pakistani, 6.0% Sri Lankan. Nearly one in four directors from South Asia alone.
• Fast food is Pakistani-dominated at 9.3%, with Indian at 7.1% and Bangladeshi at 3.8%. These are the kebab shops, fried chicken outlets, and pizza takeaways.
• Hair & beauty has a notable Vietnamese presence at 3.8% — the well-documented concentration in nail bars.
• Retail is the largest category and nearly half (48.8%) of all directors are non-British — the highest rate of any sector.
• Hospitality is the only low-skilled category where a Western European nationality leads: Irish at 6.3%.

The regional picture

Grouping non-British directors by broad region of origin, two blocs dominate:

South Asian and European nationals between them account for 64% of all non-British directors in low-skilled visa sponsors. But the similarity ends there. The European contingent — led by Italians (1,015), French (872), Irish (816), and Germans (771) — clusters in hospitality and retail. The South Asian contingent dominates convenience stores, takeaways, and fast food.

What this tells us

The Skilled Worker visa was sold as a system for British employers who genuinely can't find local staff. The data tells a different story.

When 42% of low-skilled sponsor directors aren't British, and certain nationalities are overrepresented by 6 to 11 times their share of the population, the "domestic labour shortage" narrative breaks down. What we're looking at is a system that foreign nationals have learned to use — setting up companies, obtaining sponsor licences, and importing workers from their countries of origin.

There's nothing illegal about it. Anyone can register a company in the UK and apply for a sponsor licence. But the scale reveals a structural problem: the visa system isn't plugging gaps in the British labour market. It's enabling parallel labour markets that operate largely outside it.

Explore the data yourself. Search any town or category on our homepage and see who holds the sponsor licences near you.

Data sourced from the UK Home Office Register of Licensed Sponsors and Companies House officer records. Director nationality data is available for 99.2% of low-skilled sponsors. "Non-British" excludes English, Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish nationalities. UK population figures from 2021 Census foreign-born estimates (ONS).