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?

I would rather my mum be cared for by an Indian or Filipino care worker than a disgruntled or disinterested British worker.

How telling that you think that those are the two options - virtuous foreigners vs evil , apathetic Brits.

In reality, under the incentives created by the care worker visa scheme, we end up with large numbers of people who are doing the job solely for the promise of permanent residency in five years, and a British passport a year later. Many of them couldn’t give two shits about our elderly people.

Leads to outcomes like this:

• Wolverhampton - four Nigerian care workers jailed for abusing an elderly woman with vascular dementia in the final months of her life.
• Exeter - Indian care worker jailed for deliberately inflicting pain on a 94 year old man with dementia, ‘ignoring his loud and distressing cries of pain.’ Fled back to India when discovered and had to be extradited back to the UK.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-67717148
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-68502848

You’d be happy for your mum to be cared for by this lovely Indian care worker?
https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/west-country-care-worker-jailed-9153304

I didn't use those adjectives..That's your interpretation. In my experience though, I have found S Asian and Filipino carers very good and caring. No doubt instances of abuse can be found for every nationality.

And as I said upthread, we cared for my dad in his own home and I hope to care for my mum in my own home, if all goes according to plan.

PIP is not an out of work benefit

@Genevieva @Yatuway I actually agree with Genevieva. I know two Zimbabwean people in the UK who were both research scientists in Zimbabwe, but are now a care worker and a social worker - because these are the jobs available for immigrants. So yes, it's a better life in this current circumstances, but ultimately they are still being limited by their place of birth. As many others on this post have said, in relation to immigrant care workers, many are doing it as their only route to a better life, rather than because it would be their desired career path if they had free choice. So it does individually help immigrants, but on a multi-generational level, developing other countries so that their citizens can make a decent living from a range of careers would be better. But with the cuts to the aid budget, not something we'll be helping with any time soon!

I think the problem in this country is that Reform have firmly established immigration as a 'problem'. Then politicians (Tory and Labour) are responding with knee-jerk slashes that solve the 'problem' of numbers, even when for example with the student visas the Tories cut, it sent the university sector, which employs plenty of British people, into freefall. And I see the same with this policy - in the short term at least, it's the British elderly who will suffer from an exacerbated shortage of carers. If we could have a national debate and consensus around what benefits we collectively want immigration to provide our country, then we could create more sensible rules that maximise benefits (and can reduce numbers at the same time if that's what we want), rather than slashing and burning just for the sake of numbers. And policies that encourage temporary migration with better benefits for both the UK and the immigrant would be part of that, in my view.

You would be happy for your mum to be cared for by this lovely British born care worker?
We couid do this all day.🙄
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c365ndk1ejeo.amp

This.

Nobody wants to work in care for minimum wage. It’s not worth the stress/most people cannot afford to work for minimum wage.

There’s a care home around the corner from me. I thought about applying to pick up some extra income around the kids/DH work. They want somebody fully flexible, 12 hour shifts on minimum wage and on zero hour contracts.

Who on earth would be willing to work on Christmas Day/weekends/night shifts for minimum wage. Nobody. Hence why they have to get workers from overseas.

Taxpayers - because it’s far cheaper in the long run than saddling ourselves with the long term costs of importing hundreds of thousands of new low skilled, low paid workers and their families.

Every group of people has some bad apples. We don’t need to increase their number by deliberating importing them.

Foreign-born and foreign-trained doctors, nurses and carers are disproportionately likely to be convicted of malpractice. That is a fact.

@EasternStandard

"It’s hard to get staff because there’s an extra carrot for people taking visas."

I agree that there is an extra carrot for people coming in from poorer countries in that they can come in and put up with a tough job on a low (UK) salary for just as long it takes to get residency and then leave to get a better paying and less tough job.

But on that logic and given that many posters are concerned about the cost of employing UK residents, would you support scrapping the need to pay a minimum wage to migrant labour. I mean if it's really about getting residency then they'd probably do the job for very little?

Oh well, my dad was a foreign born doctor invited here to help the NHS. He worked mostly with foreign born and trained doctors, nurses and care workers. All incredibly hard working and caring. Some educated to masters level.

Your theories don't wash with me.

Thank you, this is it!

Like I said in a PP, I have known some amazing immigrant workers same as UK heritage workers, and some absolutely appalling ones.

And some from the Windrush and post generation made a lot of money with agency work and then opened up their own care homes. Some with physical care-needs i'd guess, but often not.

I'm talking in mental health where in my city, if most statutory placements wouldn't take someone or just because it was cheaper, there'd be somewhere colloquially name Mrs-whatever name home who basically provided room and board at inflated costs to the NHS and social care as in-person physical care wasn't needed but mental health care was. Which the people weren't receiving in run-down houses of multiple occupancy called supported housing. But Mrs-was making bank from the NHS and social care.

And telling her relatives back home how she was now rich and the streets were paved with Gold in the UK because the UK didn't want to look after their own vulnerable people.

And sometimes she'd employ the relatives that migrated in her homes but that didn't pay much so they'd leave and get slightly-better paid jobs in other care homes but it really wasn't the life of luxury they expected so they'd be claiming benefits and housing on top.

There's already a massive flight of tax payers, so by all means raise taxes further to pay for care. That will be popular.

I was one of those ' needing to take what they can get' people.

A long time out of work and I couldn't even get an interview. Care was the last thing on my mind but the one sector where jobs were aplenty so I applied and I got a job and loved it.
I am pretty darn good at my job too if I must say.
People coming from certain oversees countries to fill gaps, not so much. Extremely lazy and obviously don't want to be in the job.

My point is about use of language. If you think the workers themselves are one of the parties in the discussion, you agree with me. I'm of the view that if the workers are to be treated as belonging to the state they're from rather than actors in their own interests, everyone should be explicit about that and own the implications and criticisms.

Fwiw, given the way global birth rates are going, I do expect to see that argument made more and more over the next few decades! Youth as a resource.

As opposed to the massive long-term tax rises needed to cover the burden to the NHS and welfare state of importing hundreds of thousands of new low skilled workers? The data from Denmark clearly shows that only immigration from EU countries plus the UK/US/Canada/Australia/NZ is a fiscal net benefit - all other immigrant groups are a drain on public finances, even into the second and third generation.

That’s not to say that all of those migrants are drains - of course some are high skilled workers who contribute more than they take out - but on average that simply isn’t the case. Why would it be any different here than in Denmark?

I am not even sure increasing TFR would help.

There are definitely a lot of high skilled European, American and Australian doctors and nurses desperate to work for the NHS.

So by all means only let in migrants from those countries. That will work well.

No I wouldn’t support this. I think it would cause other problems.

I think it happens and people arrive and work for very little in non legal situations but it’s not something I’d make policy.

ETA it happens not in care work but generally.

I think just looking at immigrants in terms of pay doesn’t make sense here as in this instance they are filling gaps in a low paid industry. If pay was increased it wouldn’t mean the shortages of willing workers would evaporate over night.

There are is far more to contribution than money but in your example it’s still going to cost us money: either by the cost of low skilled / low paid migrants or supporting the wages offered by parts of the care industry so it reaches levels that encourage people to do the work.

It will cost us either way.

(Also the data you mention is more of a damning indictment on how low our salaries are that so many in work are still net recipients.)

And if it did, it wouldn't be for a while. Though it's not like we're going to do that anyway. It's one of those I wouldn't start from here problems.

"The reason people are often long term unemployed is because they're unemployable. They would either be off sick a lot of the time or unable to do some of the basics of the job due to adjustments needed."

This is what I don't understand is why people on the left prefer to import cheap labour and want to write off the 9 million economically inactive UK nationals as unemployable or off sick a lot of the time or unable to do basics of the job. This is the attitude that I would expect from the right wing.

Exactly this. Whoever is doing the formal caring labour is liable to be a net financial drain, be they a UK worker or an immigrant. Unless and until we get to a point where we pay care workers enough for this not to be the case, and we're clearly not there yet, our options are to either have the formal caring labour done or not. Bear in mind also that if we choose option B, that means care from within families and friend instead, so some people who are doing important and/or net contributing work elsewhere will instead have to do it. With the accompanying implications for the tax base and possibly for others who were relying on their skills.

There's no free lunch here. There's not even a cheap one.

Net migration last year was over 700,000. Only 20,000 of those were doctors and nurses. We could cut net migration by over 600,000 without even touching those jobs.

The pro-migration zealots have an entirely unrealistic perception of how many immigrants are actually doctors and nurses…