Hospitals full and elderly left to suffer: care leaders warn of crisis after migrant care worker ban
Care leaders have told LBC of the crisis facing the social care sector after the government banned international recruitment in its drive to slash overall immigration.
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Workers from overseas have “propped up” adult social care for years, industry leaders have told LBC, warning that the adult social care sector is now facing enormous staff shortages after the government closed the overseas care visa route in July this year.
The lack of migrant workers could see hospitals overcrowding, a shortage of care home beds and elderly people left without home care, in a year's time, they warned.
The most recent figures show more than 130,000 vacancies for care workers across England in 2023/24 - down from 152,000 in 2022/23, due to largely recruiting workers from abroad.
But, visas issued for health and care workers and their families have tumbled from 267,348 in the year to June 2024 to 61,901 in the 12 months to this June - a fall of 77 per cent.
The move comes amid increasing government efforts to cut migration, but experts in the sector have warned that overseas workers - who currently account for about a third of the workforce - are vital to the care sector.
“Staff from overseas are providing a very valuable resource to social care,” Professor Martin Green, head of Care England, told LBC.
“But the government seems to have an immigration policy which rests on stopping people with the skills we need from entering the country, whilst at the same time, losing control of other aspects of the migration system,” he added.
“There is also no coherent strategy on how to attract more people into social care, and the government response that they are bringing in a care wage is not going to happen quickly, and is also completely unfunded.
“Not for the first time, the government policy is heavy on soundbites, but with no roadmap to delivery”.
Care leaders have warned they now won’t be able to fill the huge number of vacancies, and that the sector will struggle to provide adequate care to the hundreds of thousands relying on their services.
“The drop in recruitment will bite,” Nadra Ahmed, co-chair of the National Care Association told LBC.
“Stopping the international recruits will bite and it may just happen just when we need them the most, as we go into the winter months and winter pressures start to appear, we'll start to notice that people won't be able to go home because the home care services will not have sufficient workforce to deliver the care that's required in different areas,” she added.
Home care is the area that will feel the drop in recruitment the most, Ms Ahmed says, and this will have a knock-on effect on the NHS as patients will have to stay in hospitals longer. She compared the effects to the Covid-19 pandemic, which saw the social care sector lose around 40,000 staff.
“The need for social care is going to increase,” she said, adding: “because the demographics are clear. We've got more people living longer, with more complex and chronic conditions.
“So we'll get this all over again in the winter months because they'll have hospitals full of people.
“And they might be elderly folk, many frail and elderly people, who could go back home, but they won't be able to get the cover of the care workers because we're not able to recruit.”
When announcing the closure of international recruitment in May, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said British firms should instead hire British nationals, or recruit from the people who already came to the UK on the visa.
She said: "We will allow them to continue to extend visas and also to recruit from more than 10,000 people who came on a care worker visa, where the sponsorship visa was cancelled.
"Effectively, they came to jobs that weren't actually here or that were not of a proper standard,” Ms Cooper added.
"They are here and care companies should be recruiting from that pool of people, rather than recruiting from abroad, we are closing recruitment from abroad”.
But the reality is less straightforward, Ms Ahmed said, highlighting that many of those people might not qualify for care positions, but have been “conned into coming over” by ‘unscrupulous’ providers - who sometimes charge thousands of pounds.
She explained that care providers normally apply for a limited number of visas to recruit staff if they cannot find employees in the UK - usually around a few dozen applications at a time.
But in recent years, recruitment companies have been set up, requesting thousands of visas from the Home Office and then charging potential workers large sums of money for those visas - in some documented cases, as high as £3,000.
Ms Ahmed said: “We were finding that these poor displaced workers who are here legally, they've paid for that visa to come across and work in social care. They were going and knocking on care home doors and saying, ‘please, have you got a job?’”
“So people have been conned into coming over here on that visa,” she added. “So the system's been abused by paying recruiters huge amounts of money when they didn't need to, to apply for the licences to come across. So we've got a whole army of displaced workers who were brought into the country under those conditions by recruiters with no jobs to go to.”
Other workers were brought over without passing the requirements for care jobs: some can’t drive, while others don’t speak English well enough, meaning they don’t qualify for care jobs. In those cases, they can end up being in the country illegally once their visa expires.
But hiring employees from the UK is even more difficult, as there simply aren’t enough people to fill the jobs, and there the government has ‘actually made no plans’ to replace the overseas workforce.
“This is what's really difficult,” Ms Ahmed said. “The Home Office has made this announcement that we have to take on a domestic workforce, but there isn't a domestic workforce out there.
“We've made no plans to make the image of the sector better. We've done nothing to improve the career structure. We've done nothing to make sure that we can pay them properly, [the sector] be funded properly, so we can pay them properly.”
She added that the government shouldn’t have just closed the route down completely, but “started tapering it off”.
“They should have started building up a better image of social care as a career, creating a career pathway, a spine of good pay, and then keep tapering it down.”
Unions, ministers and employers have been negotiating for a fair pay agreement for months, to ensure the adult social care sector in England is properly funded to attract more employees.
“Migrant care workers have propped up an essential public service in recent years,” UNISON general secretary Christina McAnea told LBC.
“Without them, care homes and services would simply not have coped. Those already in the UK deserve respect and security, but new immigration rules are causing increased hardship.
“The power employers currently hold over migrant care workers through visa sponsorship has led to exploitation and mistreatment, which must end. We need a fair, sector-wide visa sponsorship scheme to protect staff.
“All of this makes it essential to fully fund and deliver the government’s Fair Pay Agreement in social care. Pay and conditions must improve so that the UK can attract and retain high-quality care staff.”
A government spokesperson said: “The care visa route saw unacceptable levels of abuse and exploitation which is why we closed it.
“The social care sector cannot be propped up by exploiting migrant workers on poverty pay.
“We are building a National Care Service, investing an extra £3.7 billion in social care this year, and properly valuing the people who look after us by introducing a Fair Pay Agreement for care workers.”