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?

This leads to another issue of us draining developing countries of their resources. They have educated these young people to be doctors and nurses. We are using them to do minimum wage care work by tempting them with permanent residency when they cannot work here as doctors and nurses.

@TempestTost

They are called the "Lanyard Class":

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14689521/amp/Labours-lanyard-class-hostile-environment-working-class-voters.html

That used to be the case. For decades, British Indians were among the highest earning groups in this country, routinely out-earning white Britons. Precisely because the British Indian population was comprised near exclusively of the African Indians who were expelled from Uganda or chose to leave Kenya - middle-class, entrepreneurs who were of a sufficiently go-getting nature that they’d already chosen to migrate across an ocean in search of greater economic opportunity once.

But since 2020, standards have been slashed, and the average wages of British Indians have fallen dramatically, far below those of white Brits. It’s of course, nothing to do with the established population, but with the hundreds of thousands of new arrivals who are far less skilled and incredibly lowly paid.

Pretending that all immigrants are the same is a common tactic of the pro-immigration zealot. But doctors and delivery drivers are not equal contributors.

Also - students aren't really migrants in the normal sense. They may work a little, if allowed, but mainly they are more likely extended tourists, they spend money and go home. That's not a problem.

Not immediately obvious how you think this would work. We don't live in a command economy, and the state doesn't 'deploy' workers. If you tried banning all these things, recruitment in the legal sector would go through the roof because of all the challenges! A good chunk of these people would also simply piss off elsewhere rather than look for the nearest care home, since you presumably don't think you're going to ban entertainers globally.

Any solution people offer does actually have to fit within our existing political framework rather than that of, say, the USSR.

😂 I know responding in emojis is lazy but what can one say to this Soviet style solution?

@TempestTostI think that one might need a rethink. In the brainstorm of society group no bad ideas and all that but I think it’s a bit soviet.

It wouldn't work.

But the underlying problem is we have a lot of people tied up in work that is less important than the work that really needs to be done.

Many prefer to give that necessary work to those they see as inferior to them, while they continue to go to university and get an office job that pays a nice professional wage.

It may be that the only way to see change is simply not to bring in people to fill the underlying jobs. But keeping so many in nice middle class useless work isn't sustainable.

The other thing to keep in mind is taxes paid. If we kill off some sectors the U.K. economy would not function.

If your food is rotting on the ground and your population is therefore starving, working in advertising is not going to seem all that useful.

The question people keep asking is where all the workers who did hard jobs have gone? Well we've lost some to low population growth, but a heck of a lot are just in other kinds of work.

That's the basic problem to be solved. I am not really suggesting that we force people into any kind of work, but I do think we need to understand the problem. It's not lack of people, it's too many people in useless jobs.

Decades ago maybe. The 3rd/4th/5th generation migrants often don't want to take over corner shops and why should they?. It's a vanishing business in the modern world with 24/7 supermarkets, Amazon, food delivery etc. They tend to be a lot more expensive and you actually have to go there whereas with delivey services you don't.

And that was never the same as 'education was the way forward' . For some immigrant families it was, but for many, education was irrelevant.

And the first generation migrants that we're now seeing in the NHS for example are often here to make money to send home and aren't invested in settling in the UK unless it's financially lucrative.

It's bullshit the idea that people born in the UK don't want to work or are lazy. They just actually had employment rights and Unions that left the idea that you should just be grateful to work to live, no matter how shit years ago.

That's why the immigrants are coming here. Why else?

No. It's because the poverty and standard of living in their countries is shit. With limited or no, welfare and healthcare so despite all of our problems, it's a great deal better than their counties of origin.

They were never doing us a favour.

I think in the end it will be a choice between a long decline or a quick painful change. Including to tax revenue.

Though AI may take care of it for us in the end. A lot of middle class professionals will be made redundant.

The pp covers this a bit, you’d end the UK’s ability to function.

ETA why do you feel strongly about mc professionals?

You're right, it wouldn't work.

But that also means that even if we accept your view of the relative value of various roles, your use of the term 'keeping' is incorrect. The state is only responsible for a part of that, and isn't in a position to prevent people from engaging in commerce unless we have significant political reform, become a non-capitalist society and also find a way to prevent people from leaving. Which is a lot harder than it looks, ask the Eritreans.

And nobody will mind the already ludicrous care prices rising even higher for poor old Nana.

Lucky therefore, that the proprietors have already acquired their Bentley.

Nailed it. Load of them are on this site slagging off social housing tenants Where the fuck do they think the people doing essential low paid jobs live

No, it is a problem as a number of individuals come here on student visas then over-stay and claim asylum.

40% of individuals who came to the UK on work , student or visitor visas, then claim asylum.

It's one of the reasons why the Government is addressing immigration for care workers, as well as students.

All developed countries are in the same boat.

I actually think this is the vision that the Trump administration is (rather incompetently) trying to avoid or mitigate.

Tax revenue and productivity, as it's measured by economists, is going to tank. I think that's a given. Moving money around isn't really productivity, especially when your basic social functions aren't happening.

Childcare and education are in a similar state. We are basically not managing to fund the building blocks of society while on a quest for high GDP. There is a serious problem with the basic setup.

Bringing in immigrant workers is just a desperate attempt to put off the inevitable , justified initially by the lie they were necessarily net contributors to the whole economy, and now justified by calling those who object racists.

Both of those tactics are failing now.

Mmm, I just don't see that happening in the near future. I don't think the public have yet sufficiently worked out what our ageing population and dependency ratio mean, and we're going to have to go further down the current path before the magical thinking stops. To that end, I suspect we'll see further lowered standards before we see wage increases, especially for those who don't have assets of their own. Obviously this is liable to have some pretty tragic results.

Yes, but that is a problem with asylum claims, not students per se. You can change how you deal with the former, or, if you like, tighten up who gets offered student visas.

I would suggest not accepting asylum claims from current students. You could create some kind of mechanism for the odd occasion when something happens like a revolution in the home country of a current student, but in general people shouldn't be allowed, it's being exploited.

I have mixed feelings on legal migration aka work visas and I think when this was said before you’d be lambasted by Labour supporters with all sorts of insults so it is an odd one to see them switch so comprehensively because Starmer switches due to Reform threat.

Overall it is a bit of a Ponzi scheme which is hard to sustain, but oth care workers visas going will have an impact on price, who does care and as pp said ‘bed blocking’ which is an issue.

I can’t stand Labour’s hypocrisy but I don’t mind talking about what should be done.

I am confused here. Understand that people in the UK who are unemployed should be taking these roles or finding something else they would like to do. That is where I think this is going. It should not be an option to do nothing whatsoever or play the system.

Since 2019 the number of working-age people receiving health-related benefits has increased by 38 per cent, from 2.8 million to 3.9 million, meaning that one in ten people of working age now receives some form of disability benefit.

1/8 young people 16/25 are not in education or working. What on earth are they doing?

Bringing in low paid people who bring their family who often arent working or are too young alongside a group of people who think that work isnt for them is not sustainable. It just makes a bad situation worth

As recently as 2013/14 welfare spending (including pensions) was £210 billion; in 2023/24 it had reached £296 billion and by the end of this decade it will hit £378 billion, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility. Meanwhile the economy is forecast to grow by little more than 1 per cent per year over the rest of this Parliament.

This cannot continue and what are Labour doing about the illegal boats? £4m per day and growing. Why cant we have boats offshore that will house these people. These people are unknown and mainly middle eastern young with often shocking views of what women's rights are.

Process effficiently - no wait - these government depts dont want to be efficient. They want cottage industries and a job for life so they have no appitute to sort this out.

The requirements to speak a reasonable standard of English are essential (this also applies to the traditional white British people as quite often will have poor spoken and written English). When you have people working in customer services who cannot be understood then it is not a good optic for the company.

That's about it.

My Nan just died in a private care home. No fault of the care home who provided excellent care but she was paying 900 something pounds a week till before April when all of the residents/carers received a letter basically saying the fees were going up another £60 a week and to complain to the government if that was a problem as it was due to increase in minimum wage and/or NI contributions.

32 residents paying almost a grand a week. No more than 4/5 untrained staff on minimum wage per shift.

Someone's making a lot of money..

I think automation will be increasingly used in the care sector. Like those panda robots they have in Japan.