Anyone in the UK with a loved one needing professional care will tell you how difficult and how expensive it is to secure. Adult social care is a brutal business: the work is emotionally demanding, and the pay is very low, oftentimes lower than working in a supermarket. The result: there are around 110,000 staff shortages in the UK. Every household in the UK is already footing the bill, as the majority of council tax goes to social care and rises year on year. To extend a lifeline for the sector - that lessens the impact of an ageing population for the NHS - the UK government extended the Health & Care visa route in February 2022.
This Labour government has decided to put a stop to that and close the Care visa route for overseas recruitment entirely, with no concrete plan, other than vaguely promising to recruit more Britons into care. But Brits working in the sector tend to leave it for other sectors, especially entry-level NHS jobs with more opportunities for career progression. Simply put, few people choose a career in care. Meanwhile, workers from abroad are tied to their sponsor and can’t just switch to a different sector. Immigrants are the backbone of the system, whether Labour likes to admit it or not.
Extending the period until someone can apply for indefinite leave to remain from five to ten years seems cruel, but it’s especially cruel to extend care workers’ periods to 15 years and reduce them to the ‘Boriswave,’ while they are looking after the most vulnerable in society. Using this inflammatory language, Labour is justifying the retroactive punishment of careworkers they didn’t recruit themselves, but the entire country benefited from.
With demand for careworkers expected to rise by an additional 470,000 jobs by 2040, and immigration being closed for recruitment, who is going to look after our old and frail? Who is going to make sure people get washed and dressed in the morning? Somehow, that stipulation was left out of Labour’s white paper. Labour likes to frame indefinite leave to remain as something that has to be earned. Immigrants working in care have earned that right and shouldn’t retroactively be exploited as a political tool to reduce immigration. At best, Labour’s immigration policy is careless. At its worst, Labour is willing to make vulnerable people pay the consequences for appeasing the right.