Lower migration and the tax gap: raise taxes or ease restrictions?

Just picking up on the issue of young people not wanting to do care work, I think there is a lot that needs to be sorted in the system. Although I have no direct experience, I have spoken with many of my neighbours carers (home care several times a day) and they suggest that the title is a complete misnomer - they don't have time to care. They are rushing from one care recipient to the next, not given sufficient time to do much beyond the essential and not paid enough for travel between jobs.

There is a huge mark-up on the cost of wages, as the patient pays substantially more than it costs, probably about double, which suggests that either there are huge admin costs involved or large profits are being made - maybe a combination of the two?

The cost of 4 x 30 minute visits a day (14 hours a week) over the course of a year amounts to around £28,000 (https://caretoolkit.co.uk/home-care-cost-calculator-uk/) - more than minimum wage for a 35 hour week and approximately the same as the cost of employing somebody full-time.

Carer's allowance however is just £86.45/week for a family member providing 35+ hours a week of unpaid care, a total of just £4,495.40 a year. The huge discrepancy between the cost of paying for in-home independent social care as opposed to paying a family member is another aspect that I think needs to be addressed. Caring needs to be valued in our society and this suggests otherwise.

I agree. Our answer to our problem is get white Brits working.

Importing more people doesn’t solve that problem.

Another thing that happens when foreign nationals are employed ahead of Brits is that a good part of the money they earn is sent abroad to help family in the country of origin. So it's sent out of the UK economy.

The UK is like a leaky bucket. Loads of money leaving our country and porous borders where low skilled people can easily get in.

Thanks for this post. Yes, it's completely crazy and a recipe for a breakdown in community cohesion.

Having a million NEETS is a disaster for any country and it's about time the government sorted it out. Immigration doesn't help, it just makes the situation more entrenched.

I say no to anymore increases in immigration.

It’s not just the headline figures which count. Theres a real complex situation on the ground which helps no one and has been slowly developing for decades.

I do think immigrants work, if you look at the high street where I live 2/3rds are ‘immigrant’ run shops. I say immigrant because these could be British citizens now, and some second generation. They work hard. I am not saying they shouldn’t be doing what they are doing.

My point to the above is that it’s not an issue in itself, and they offer entry level unskilled work and plenty of it.

My issue is that if you as a white British woman, or your partner as a white British man, or your children as white British youth were to go into any of these establishments and try to get a job - 90% would be a no. They hire within themselves. Whether that’s family, ethnic ties, language ties, country ties.

This phenomenon is not unique to small private retail. I work with a large national employer of ‘unskilled labour’ with various locations across the country and the moment you have a manager of an ethnicity you can guarantee the team will quickly transform with new hires matching the managers. Ie. Turkish will hire Turkish. Polish hire polish, Indian hire Indian.

So on the ground there is a logistical issue with white brits getting work and that leaves it all to the super big employers. And I am not 100% sure the problem doesn’t exist there either.

And then everyone complains white Brits don’t work!

What? Person A still exists, if they’re unemployed you’ll have to continue supporting them via the state.

What an odd argument you’ve made.

Agree. Young people should be working.

@AmberTigerEyes And of course they spend their earnings! They don’t just save it! Although savings are there to fund business growth! Or fund the government via gilts. The whole economy depends on inter-connected money. However the biggest problem
is that we have low growth, and we are not generating enough money! This is what we need to do or government spending will curtail. Recycling money doesn’t fund growth in any meaningful way or provide income tax either. All welfare spending is provided by taxes or borrowing. Taxes revenues are falling because too few are working and borrowing is at record levels so taxation goes on borrowing costs ! It’s madness.

That’s because GDP and GDP per capita can be manipulated to be higher by the government spending more and handing out tax breaks to get businesses to invest more. GDP is not a good indicator of how well off we are because it can be manipulated to look better very easily,

But most of the money paid in welfare goes back into the economy.

A significant amount for working age households (not pensioners), goes to private landlords because housing is the biggest expenditure in a household on benefits. Out of £145bn in welfare for working age households, £37bn goes to landlords - which isn’t the full cost of rent as most households find they have to top up the housing benefit/housing element.

Agree 100%

That's why I find it so baffling that people on the left are so keen on immigration. What it mainly does is suppress wages, especially for the lowest paid. I think they just haven't thought it through properly.

Well if you employ Worker B you then have to pay dole money to Worker A. If you employ Worker A you don't have to pay dole money to Worker B.

So employing Worker A is obviously preferable. It also makes more sense for a whole load of non-financial reasons as having more people in the country puts a strain on all our services including our natural environment and our wildlife.

Wages and conditions for care homes would have improved if immigration hadn't been used to keep them low. If the care homes couldn't recruit in the UK on the wages they were paying then wages would have had to increase, that's a free market in operation. The free market has been tampered with and so many are poorer for it.

I agree, benefits for able bodied people who choose not to work should be cut.

Also wages and conditions for jobs like care work should be improved so that British people can move into the roles that are needed instead of the current crazy situation where they are unemployeand we're importing people to do this very vital work.

Agree 100%

It's absurd to import people into our country when we have a million NEETS and thousands of over 50s struggling to find work.

Some of the posts here seem to be saying foreign workers are cheaper to employ because we haven't had to pay for their schooling etc. But if we employ a load of foreign workers we then have to pay benefits to all the out of work British people. Do we really want to create an economic scrapheap of British people while importing more people from abroad? What are the implications for society, mental health etc, which are also bad for our economy?

Immigrants are willing to do this, with no expectation of benefits for many years.

For five years max. Until they get ILR.

As to reducing unemployment using sanctions?
I keep on linking this thread
To drop my hours to 22.5 even though I’m a single parent? | Mumsnet

The poster can work but chose to reduce her hours to get the same money from benefits rather than work. This illustrates the fundamental issue with our welfare system and needs to be fixed first. I don't blame this poster, but I do blame system, and you're very wrong if you think that the number of such cases in vanishingly small. Even if it small, it has to be precisely zero.
We must exhaust the pull on local labour, make unemployment count close to zero, only then allow immigration.

ETA: if you do this, there won't be a need for NMW - in order to survive the businesses will have to pay living wages appropriate for the area. But for this to happen the state must stop UC and the likes apart from time limited and linked to previous earnings support. And PIP assessments should be F2F and approved for sever cases only.

They are filling required roles only until they receive ILR and get access to the same benefits as Brits.

There are millions of Brits refusing to fill these roles because they have access to benefits.

I do agree with you completely that these roles should be better paid, but simultaneously benefits must be slashed drastically so Brits are forced to take jobs which are currently filled by migrants. These Brits moving from welfare to employment will both pay tax and reduce government spend on welfare and by doing this will increase available funding for investment in social housing, defense etc.

But @Mouldemortworker A will cost us that amount in costs whatever happens, even if they sit around unemployed. We can’t kick a citizen who doesn’t get a job out to work elsewhere, we can only try to incentivise them to work and not let people who might become a burden in. We need to ensure employment for all Worker As.

It’s clear that you started this thread without reading all the materials and it is evident that you don’t understand basic concepts like fixed costs (worker A) and variable costs (worker B).

You are wasting your time debating with @Mouldemort , her mind is made up.
Most people agree with you though.

As I just said, it’s irrelevant anyway. Low paid British citizens are here, have a right to be here, and will be staying here. There is a balance between net recipients and net contributors.

If we add another 2 million net recipients, the country becomes poorer, the citizens become poorer. At a time when the government has just said they are down to their last 7 billion, and now that seems to have disappeared too.

Read the thread! We have already discussed that a lot of costs that should be attributed to the cost of immigration are not.