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 go into a lot of LD care homes for work. I see some absolutely amazing interactions between staff and residents, some staff who adore the living daylights out of their residents and who grieve for them like their own family members if they pass away (because the health inequalities for people with LD are still fucking appalling) and then I go into homes with massive staff turnover who just spam the NHS with referrals, not wanting to achieve good quality of life for residents and reduced distress behaviour by actually changing the environment - but just want medication to wave a magic wand and basically sedate people down for an easy life.

I've delivered staff training on supporting someone's communication to staff teams who were ALL new arrivals from overseas, and I've gone into so many homes where it's a nightmare trying to find anyone able to communicate with me about basic information about their residents (and language barriers have been a huge part of it). There's still a lot of places out there where there's no purposeful activity apart from the TV blaring all day - and staff don't interact at all with residents. We do what we can as our service - but we're limited when we can't get staff buy in to take things on board, or when staff teams don't have the skills to support their residents. Distress behaviour increases, staff and residents get hurt, and the whole thing goes to shit.

The answer has to be more than just blocking one staffing route if there's a staff shortage - valuing and skilling up care staff, but that costs money and time and people don't appear to want to provide either.

That's a good idea.

And could also apply for work visas as that is clearly a problem lumped into the visa asylum claims.

Hope you are including child minding in your utopia Because i dont see why it should only be elderly people used as potential collateral damage to keep unemployment figures down

Childcare is absolutely a problem too.

We've taught people that caring for children and the elderly is degrading, and we pay them as if it is too.

That might be the case for some individuals, but the U.K. should set its immigration policy around their preferences. It’s clearly better for the U.K. to have a rolling turnover of staff on lower paid jobs that we can’t fill domestically, so they leave instead of becoming a burden on the state or on national infrastructure (housing / schools / medical needs). It’s also beneficial for us if we can build an economy with more fabulous job opportunities than our population can fill and for people to fill those for several years, gain experience and take that home with them. It builds international relations and it helps countries we currently give aid to, to become more prosperous and financially independent.

FORTY PERCENT?

There were 2.2 million visit visas granted last year and I can promise you that a million people did not claim asylum 😄

i agree but there are a lot of hypocrites on here who dont mind the elderly being put at risk but hum a different tune when its kids. Its the hypocrisy that pisses me off
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5326040-childcare-is-not-a-dumping-ground-for-the-unemployable?page=1

Which is fine, but if this is what you think, make that argument and don't give an assessment of pros and cons that completely leaves out the people actually doing the work.

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

I think you need to check your maths:

3.1 million visas were granted in 2024, allowing individuals to come to the UK to visit, work, study or join family members.

There were 40,000 asylum claims in 2024 from people who had held a visa. Of these

40% (16,000) had a study visa
29% (11,500) had a work visa
24% (9,500) had a visitor visa
the remaining 7% had other forms of leave.

Almost 10,000 people who claimed asylum after having entered on a visa were provided with asylum support in the form of accommodation at some point during 2024. This number rises to over 25,000 when considering claims lodged between 2022 and 2024, inclusive.

Agree. Our economy, for good or bad is based on services, including leisure services and include things like golf course management, hospitality management and the creative industries. Chucking people out of these jobs to make people do care work, or plumbing or construction would cause the economy to collapse.
50% of young people go to University, yet all the conversation is still about that 50%, and why instead of doing degrees they should be training to be a plumber ( normally other peoples children though, never their own darling)
But these aren't the 50% who are not in education or training. Most of them will get work, even if it is not in their degree area because they have an education and have managed to navigate a very narrow education system that really only cares about people going to University. They are also not the ones who have the majority of mental and physical health problems, partly because they have been thrown on the scrapheap at 16.
We need to be looking at the other 50%, investing hugely in FE colleges, differentiating education and training, encouraging employers and older plumbers, electricians, tradespeople to train the 50% of young people who do not go to University into fulfilling well paid vocational careers. Languishing on benefits for the rest of your life because you didn't get a grade 4 in GCSE English is a huge waste of human potential. Saying people shouldn't do 'worthless' degrees, most of which aren't actually 'useless' is a waste of time when we should be looking at people who don't go to University because they couldn't, but could be trained into vocational work that would provide them with a very decent career. Not taking their jobs away by telling people who have 3 A levels and want to do a degree in Drama they should be doing them instead!

@TempestTost

"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."

There are 9 million economically inactive in the UK:

www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-52660591

At the last count almost 40% of them were the over 50s actively choosing not to work because they don’t need to. With early retirement being the key driver. No amount of cajoling is going to get us back to work. Almost 30% are students.

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/why-have-older-workers-left-the-labour-market/

So it’s a fools game to think that anything but a small % of that 9 million is going to be in any way productive.

It is quite possible that even though it is a private nursing home there will be people there on council funding paying £400 per week

My mother was in a private care home of a similar size. It was probably the same sort of staffing levels providing day to day care, but there were also staff doing the management, cooking, cleaning etc, plus people who came in to do specific activities with the residents or who helped when they were taken out. They obviously had overnight staff on call, too. When she became more ill, she was desperate not to go to hospital and the home provided a trained nurse to look after her. So there may well have been considerably more staff around than you were aware of.

Are they though? 5 people a shift means employing 20 or so people to cover 24 hours a day 7 days a week 52 weeks a year. And that’s just ‘front of house’. You probably need another 5 behind the scenes. Even at minimum wage it costs around £30k a head. So there’s at least £750, and maybe £900k in staff costs by the time you add in a manger and some of them being on a bit more than minimum wage. That’s roughly 55% of your income gone.

How much do you think a 32 bed care home costs to rent or build? Probably £100k a bed, so there’s £3.2m. Annual rent on that probably £250k minium. Throw in utilities at commercial rates, and insurance. Another £100k out the door I suspect. Food, laundry and consumables? Probably £100 a head each week - so there’s another £200k or so so..

All of a sudden there’s not much of that £1.6m income left, and that assumes that the local authority paid those rates, and that the place is permanently full. 4 empty beds and you’re into a loss. But yes, care homes rake it in ;)

Ok, I don't think we're too far apart!

I do actually think that we do need to be more explicit about this aspect of belonging to a state. As it underpins most arguments about immigrants and state resources, which argue that a member of a state body is intrinsically more deserving of state resources than a non-member. 'Immigrants steal social housing', for example, is not made on the basis that the British person has contributed more to the state - its not seen as acceptable for a new immigrant with a job to take priority over someone who's been on long term benefits and never paid any tax. The British person's state membership gives them priority in these arguments above any respective individual contributions.

Daily Mail etc. articles about specific migrants transgressions are designed to build a case for that over-arching argument.

I do agree that it will be interesting to see how immigration debates change (or don't) in relation to changing demographics.

@TipsyGreenSeal £900 a week is cheap. You just won’t see that fee level here. It’s not enough for anyone to make a lot of money! You are so wrong. Also many shifts have senior staff present and they are not on minimum wage. Far from it. What about cooks, laundry, and all the other costs such as maintaining the building. My DMs fees would be £1400 a week if she was still alive. Fees need to be this level for a good home with well paid staff. Staff had been employed for years where dm was. They liked working there.

According to the Centre for Health and the Public Interest "around £1.5bn is taken out of the care home sector each year in the form of different types of returns to shareholders and investors".

https://www.chpi.org.uk/blog/investors-are-making-a-fortune-from-uk-healthcare-why-is-nobody-holding-private-equity-to-account

It is the investment companies - the rich getting richer - who are the problem here, devouring the savings of those in need of care, emptying the coffers of our local authorities, and paying actual carers a pittance. I can't believe so much of this discussion has focused on "benefits shirkers". There are all sorts of people milking the system, but the ones who are draining it dry are the rich, syphoning vast profits out of care homes, hiding their ill gotten gains in tax havens, funding media organisations to misdirect our attention and anger at some other group (benefits shirkers/immigrants/anyone but them) - and laughing all the way to the bank.

You're very fortunate to have the time and resources to care for your elderly mum in her old age.
Many people have full time jobs and/or dependent children to take into account.

Lots of care homes are owned by private equity funds. They are not doing it for nothing. There is money made, through rents, management fees, interest on loans etc.

The sector relies on importing cheap foreign labour that it can treat badly to maximise profits. Irregular shift patterns to ensure staff availability but avoid ever overpaying/overstaffing. Zero/low hours contracts. They don't want to hire local staff who might expect better working conditions. They want people willing to work 12 hour shifts because it reduces handover admin.

Tough shit. There are workers here, and they need to use them. The care home sector are resisting because:

• you can't move this business overseas. The business only exists where the old people live & staff can't work remotely.
• you can't really push the fees up any higher or you hit demand as people/councils simply can't afford to pay more
• its a regulated sector with inspections, which makes it hard to simply provided poorer care to cut costs without getting hammered/bad press

The private equity funds know being forced to train and employ uk staff who will demand better working conditions will simply hit their returns.

The other sector doing it is nursery chains. More and more of these (including lots of brands that look on first glance small/independent) are actually part of huge groups.

@user1471538275Thats not a fair comparison. Bankers and City workers are competing on a world wide basis. They can and will work in the USA and other high paying countries. Clearly care workers are not in the same category. It’s not intellectually comparable. Bankers etc earn this county a great deal of GDP. Sadly caring for the elderly hardly registers.

If wages rise, so will prices. So the elderly pay or the council pays. It’s clear we need an insurance scheme. The over 65s paying NI as well as income tax would be a start.

Just paying more doesn’t magic up better or more staff either. We have loads of people who do not want to work. They have no intention of doing this work. People needed work years ago as they didn’t have the raft of benefits available. People saw work as vital. Now they don’t. The more a career is talked down as being hard, unpleasant and not fulfilling, the more people won’t do it. It’s not all about money but how do you make wiping a bum attractive? You never will.

At no point did I say these children should be still looking after corner shops. Where on Earth did you get that idea from ? I do know though that the guy in our village shop has three children who are 2 lawyers and a doctor now . He has worked night and day to facilitate this. I would still say that most of our previous immigrants DID see education and working hard as the way forward.

As to people not coming here to do us a favour ? Well you can apply that to every immigrant that has ever come to this country as well as all my relatives who went to Canada but they have settled in their new countries and have become part of them.

Neither did I say that everyone born in the UK is lazy but there is definitely in certain sectors a theme of not working , being supported by the state and continuing to have child after child. Some of them are so fucking lazy they won't walk to the other end of the village to get free food. Can you deliver ffs 🙄 You see it put forward here on mn all the time !

Yes some immigrants may choose to send some money home to families but they are still contributing to our economy. I don't support the boatloads though of young men who bring little to the country. Human rights my backside.

I’m a radiographer & we recruited from abroad for qualified rafiographers due to shortages in the profession . Many elderly patients really struggle to understand some of my colleagues. It really is a problem in the NHS too.

Why not stop illegal entry and also stop illegal work instead of blocking those coming in to do paid work, that has tax and social security, in the jobs equal to benefits that the benefit Brits can’t be bothered to do?