AIBU to think banning new international recruitment of staff for care homes is bonkers? [Title edited by MNHQ at OP's request]

[Locutus2000]

The latest Labour lunacy chasing the coat-tails of Reform.

"Care homes will be prevented from recruiting staff from abroad as part of an overhaul of rules to drive down net migration, Yvette Cooper has said.
In a change that will concern employers in the sector, the home secretary said providers should instead seek to employ foreign staff who have already come to the country or extend existing visas.

It is part of a preview of wider plans to be announced by Cooper on Monday designed to reduce net migration to the UK."

"In a series of interviews on Sunday, Cooper said the government would not set a figure for net migration but would target recruitment in lower-skilled sectors.

Speaking to Sky News’s Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips, Cooper said: “We’re going to introduce new restrictions on lower-skilled workers, so new visa controls, because we think actually what we should be doing is concentrating on the higher-skilled migration and we should be concentrating on training in the UK.

“New requirements to train here in the UK to make sure that the UK workforce benefits, and also we will be closing the care worker visa for overseas recruitment.”

Asked by the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg where care homes would recruit staff from, Cooper said companies should recruit from a pool of people who came as care workers in good faith but had been “exploited” by unscrupulous employers.
“Care companies should be recruiting from those workers. They can also extend existing visas. They could recruit as well from people who are on other visas, who are already here. But we do think it’s time to end that care worker recruitment from abroad,” she said.

While Cooper declined to set a specific target for net migration, she said ministers believed changes to certain visas could result in “up to 50,000 fewer lower-skilled visas” over the next year."

Care homes have been at breaking point for years, few Brits want to work in them and those that do often burn out rapidly. I did several years and couldn't do it again.

Surely care homes are exactly where immigrant labour is needed? What is the alternative, other than actually paying care staff properly and improving working conditions to the point people actually want to do it?

You've already identified how to solve the staff shortage issue - improve the pay and conditions for care workers. It's skilled, physically and emotionally challenging work that requires a high level of empathy and communication skills.

It wasn't an issue in the past so it's not that Uk workers won't do the work - it's more that the pay and conditions have been driven down so far that only migrant workers will accept them - as is the case in many many uk sectors.

I thought supply and demand was a clear economic principle - somehow though, it doesn't seem to apply in the same way for care workers whereas we're told CEOs/bankers have to offer very high salaries 'to attract them'.

Getting care workers has always been an issue as far as I recall. (last 30 years that I can talk about)

You've already identified how to solve the staff shortage issue - improve the pay and conditions for care workers. It's skilled, physically and emotionally challenging work that requires a high level of empathy and communication skills.

I first worked in care around 1998 and we were having the same conversation then. Things have only got worse since.

While I'm at it - the way that care workers were treated during Covid was absolutely disgusting - and many of them voted with their feet at that time.

It's not just pay - care workers need to be treated better, have their training paid for them, better shift patterns and progression.

We cross posted, yes same for me, around 92 I started in care

Logic doesn't come into their decision making process, it has more to do with Reform getting over six times the councillors than Labour in the local elections.

I expect they're going to launch all manor of "get tough on immigration" initiatives which will result in them tearing the party apart and little of it actually happening, like "Smashing the gangs" has resulted in a 36% increase.

They ignored the immigration issue, to pursue their idealistic agenda, with the hope of the "Growth cure all", which hasn't materialised.

Make that 50 years.
I worked in healthcare for deades, and believe me, the overwhelming majority of carers/ nurses who knew how to deal with (and actually care for and interact with) patients in care/nursing homes were from overseas. Caring is not a demeaning profession for them, it's a privilege, so money will not make it any more enticing for 'english' job seekers, becausexwe tend to see it as such. Rather like the hospitality industry.
And let's be honest, we had to recruit overseas bods to pick fruit and veg 'cos local people didn't want to do it. When they left, farmers did increase wages yet still could not recruit

At the moment they recruit care workers from abroad for minimum wage. After five years they can apply for ILR and bring over family members - the average care worker brings two. They never work, or only for minimum wage

it is obvious surely that this system is madness and far worse than properly paying British people to do the job? This system was brought in by Boris and like all his schemes it is awful

Absolutely. I don't know who they are going to get to fill these roles.
Similar thing happened with tourism. Living in a tourist area a lot of businesses are closing down or still struggling with staffing issues as no one wants to take these seasonal jobs.

They are banning recruiting from abroad, not banning workers from overseas working in them.

Logic says that we can’t cut immagration

logic also says they must cut immagration because otherwise immagration will be cut by the next government

Yes. This lazy trope always gets trotted out, “We need immigrants because UK workers won’t do the jobs.” WON’T. So pay and conditions continue to remain low

Students can hardly get jobs any more, teenagers can’t get jobs - the workforce is there for tourism and fruit picking etc, if they weren’t recruiting from Zimbabwe because it’s cheaper for the business owner (but more expensive for the government when they have to cover long term health and school bills for family members)

To make it clear this means one minimum wage care job has to support an entire family. They also use the nhs and schools and need housing. It doesn’t work and is a huge cost for the government

this is labour cleaning up a terrible Tory policy!

I used to be a support worker.
I loved it and the residents I supported loved me, but I moved for office work and took my caring nature into people management and counselling because as a social care worker you're treated like absolute shit. Like less than a human sometimes.
If we start treating care workers with the respect they deserve and give them proper working conditions and a work/life balance we will attract and keep the right people in the roles.

Care workers are treated so badly that no-one from the UK really wants the job. Remember how old people were discharged from hospitals with COVID, which they then passed onto the other residents in the care homes, as well as the staff, many of whom had vulnerable relatives and small children at home, and crucially, who did not get paid apart from statutory sick pay while off with the COVID that the government's policy had infected them with. And then to add insult to injury, this was all covered up and the care workers themselves were blamed by the press for the numbers of deaths in care homes!!! It was a disgrace.

There are many wonderful care workers, who are regularly racially abused, spat at, scratched, punched etc daily by the residents of care homes. None of this is reported. Some old people sexually approach their carers too. A male friend of ours, a care worker, had an old lady constantly grabbing his crotch and flashing her boobs suggestively. He was embarrassed and upset and had to ask not to work with that lady again. A colleague of his, a Filipino lady, also had her bottom grabbed by an old man, who got angry when she asked him to stop, and he called her a racial insult.

We will struggle to recruit unless we pay people better and treat them with the respect they deserve.

Do you think part of it is that care workers are so poorly paid they are never going to be net contributors?

DSis is the only British-citizen employee in the (large, part of a national chain!) care home she works in. She’s part of the hiring process too and sees the CVs - very few British applicants. Occasionally they’ll get one - they’ll start, and leave in a week or so after experiencing the awful conditions and what’s expected for the min wage pay - recent immigrants are the only ones who ‘put up’ with it. The system definitely needs reform but just stopping hiring those who are the only ones signing up for the job will bring awful consequences to some of our most vulnerable.

It was a pretty good job for a while working for the NHS or council as a community HCA, when I moved across from the private sector we got generous mileage, lots of time to provide care and decent management, pension and leave. They paid me to train as a Registered Nurse. We used to feel sorry for the private carers who were abused and taken advantage of back then.

The job I had has largely been contracted out to the private sector now with the associated terms and conditions such as no travel time or costs, zero hours contracts and so on.

Yeah, I didn't word that well and I'm too late to edit.

Edit: have asked MNHQ to edit the title.

I imagine it's being done to work alongside the initiative to get the people who no longer qualify for benefits into work and looking after themselves.

Makes sense really, thousands of people now need to work who couldn't/wouldn't before, they need jobs to go into.
If the thoughts were that care work was undesirable for British people there's going to be a lot more people who need to take what they can get.

I think what's been happening is people who want to get into the UK just use the care worker visa as a way in and don't then stay working in care. Plus it's not worth it for the UK to bring in 1 care worker who then also brings their spouse, 3 kids and grandma in, and ends up costing the state loads more via education, health, benefits to top up low paid work etc.
Better that they consider how to incentivise care work so that it's a better option for people already here because there's plenty of jobs in it available

I think care homes are going to have to start offering fair pay.

Care workers and senior care workers aren't allowed to bring spouses or children @Emanresuunknown and even doctors can't bring their grandma.

I've recently been helping a lady who came over here from Zimbabwe to work as a live in carer about six years ago in her fifties. Now too ill to work and claiming over £1300 a month in UC and PIP and needing housing which she will get paid for too when the council find her somewhere. We will be funding her for the next 25+ years no doubt as she has no intention to return to her home country as her family ( now grown up kids are here too ). In my city this is a situation I see over and over, people in low paid work who have paid next to nothing into the system now taking out large amounts. I do feel sorry for these people people but don't understand how they are able to come here to work in their fifties when a lot of people's health starts to deteriorate?