Technology companies are bringing overseas staff into the UK at twice the rate of all the other professional services combined, sparking renewed claims that businesses are using transfers to get around immigration laws.

New figures from the Association of Professional Staffing Companies (Apsco), which represents Britain’s IT recruiters, show that 29,240 IT workers from outside the European Union entered the UK last year using the “intra-company transfer” route, which lets companies bring staff from overseas offices into the country. The large majority of these were from India.