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?

It was only 10 per person from Zimbabwe I think, so the average overall could still be 3

Except the economics is dictated by how much they can charge for a place in a care home, which in the majority of cases is effectively dictated by the local authority, which in turn is constrained by central government funding. So one of the key reasons that staff aren’t paid more is because the government won’t fund the cost of care appropriately. At the same time, it’s massively increased the cost of staff by ramping up employers NI, and ramped up the cost of living for staff by freezing personal allowances, increasing council tax and inflating energy prices. Overlay on that an aging population and declining birth rate, and without immigration the whole system falls apart. The government has no strategy; it hasn’t had one since it got into power

When costs go up again what will local authorities do? They’re already on the brink of going under due to NI

ETA I agree with you

Ideally we’d have a rolling recruitment cycle of people who come for 3 to five years then leave and are replaced by others. Each person would get some career enhancing experience, save a bit of money to take home and experience life in the U.K.. Our failure is that low wage immigration becomes permanent resettlement, which lowers our GDP per capita and puts huge strain on both public services and the welfare state. Until our government enforce fixed term visas this sort of knee jerk reaction will be par for the course.

It’s hard work, often antisocial hours. Even if you increased pay (how, individuals, families and councils are already struggling to fund care!) I don’t think you’ll have British born workers rushing to sign up - every care home here is desperately seeking staff, all the domiciliary agencies too, I’ve been offered £17.50 an hour to work as hoc shifts for young adult learning disability care, but that is high and only because I have specific skills, safeguarding, food hygiene etc but I won’t do it.

I suppose so, although I don't think I've ever seen an application for someone seeking to bring 9 dependents so it seems excessive - and to balance it out, even if most other nationalities only bring 0-1-2, given that Zimbabweans are a tiny proportion of the numbers overall, wouldn't they need about 30 dependants each to make that work? I'm much better at law than maths though 😅

I did go and look for the data - I found 2024 Q4's data which showed just 310 grants of entry clearance to Zimbabwean care workers and senior care workers. None available that I can see for the first six months (presumably the person means Q1 and Q2) of 2024, and the number of dependants wasn't in the table.

Except more than half of care homes are making over 20% profit and over a third are making 30% profit. There are a lot of people making a lot of money (much of it at taxpayers’ expense, bankrupting councils in the process) in the care sector and they could cope with paying more and improving working conditions, it’s just greed stopping them.

Personally, I’d bring them all back into government ownership - privatisation has been an expensive mistake, on the whole, and it’s time we learned that lesson and started fixing it.

What wrong about it? How about getting the 10 million people of working age into work who have decided that they would rather live on taxpayer’s dime. What a novel idea, eh?

Cue the excuses on why all these millions cannot take these jobs.

It’s unfair to home grown workers because care homes do not offer the flexibility for some prospective employees.
The amount of job adverts that expressly say must able to do xyz is a barrier to some even before they apply.

Totally agree with this.

I've been in domiciliary care work for just over 30 years, and I earn £14.40p/h.

However, my actual earnings come in way below NMW, due to the time I spend travelling around.

It's a good job I love it, because I would earn much more in retail or hospitality.

If those home grown workers are so very opposed to barriers in paid employment, which by definition paid employment has, maybe they can be self employed. The problem is that millions consider themselves too special to take jobs with ‘barriers’ and expect everyone else to pay for them to live for free.

EBITDARM is the earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, amortisation, rent and management charges. So it’s hardly a measure of real profitability is it? In fact, it’s not profit at all.

Someone has to fund the building they operate in. The equipment needed is also not cheap, and I imagine the depreciation alone for an average sized care home is pretty significant. I am sure that borrowed money is involved, so ignoring interest is a fools game. Management charges can be a “how long is a piece of string” I agree.

But the real reason local authorities don’t run care homes is they can’t do it for the price they pay the outsourced care homes.

My friend works as a carer. He’s a qualified teacher, but enjoys working with seniors. He told me today that the staff who have come from overseas have to work 40 hours a week to keep their right to live and work here. This means that British staff sometimes have less hours.
Caring is a hard job, and wages need to reflect that. It’d be more cost effective to improve wages so that people can afford to embark on a career in caring. Long term it would save money as overseas workers are allowed to bring children which has cost implications for the NHS and Education system.

My old, deaf (and many other issues) neighbour has a team of careworkers from overseas. I can't understand them. They can't understand me. He obviously can't understand them. They can't understand what he eats and doesn't eat. They can't understand they need to keep things clean. They can't understand not to spit on the pavement outside his house before they go in. I could go on.

Really? That’s your take on the situation?
Yeah let’s fuck over all the disabled, single mothers etc because your barriers are bullshit 🙄

Its a huge difficulty. As you get older you're more likely to have hearing problems but what a lot of people dont realise is that as you age, you lose your ability to tune into different accents which are not your own, which are quite strong.

Its happening to me and Im only in my 50s. Used to have a very very keen tuned ear for all sorts of strong accents from around the world, now I struggle to hear strong UK accents and make sense of them let alone those from the Indian subcontinent and African countries.

We need to improve pay and conditions for all lower paid jobs.
Many of them, the hours are too long to sustain the energy and good nature you need.

The grind in caring roles is the relentlessness of it- day in, day out, while some of your clients are really difficult. We need a bit more variety and shorter shifts so we can sustain patience and good humour when things are trying!

I’m sure there are better ways to structure things.

Completely agree with all of this and how awful for your friend and his colleague who were sexually and racially harassed.

Yes, the behaviours are due to various disorders, but that doesn't mean that the behaviours are not distressing for and/or physically violent towards the care staff. No, I'm not suggesting the police be called each time, but I am suggesting that care work and the risks involved for the staff be adequately remunerated. We might actually be able to recruit and crucially, retain, from within our own island if that were the case, rather than exploiting people from other countries.

The problem here is that too few Brits want these jobs. I don’t blame them. But, forcing people to do it, from job centres. will lead to abuse and problems, 🤷‍♀️

Care workers are really exposed to covid and other airborne infections at work. They're one of the highest occupational areas for long covid
It would really help with staff shortages and reducing staff sickness if we had improved it in health and social care settings
Petition here for improved mitigations including new air quality standards if anyone would like to sign)it's the last day for this, we need around 2,500 more signatures by midnight tonight
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/700304

Im not minimising the effect on staff, I have been assaulted twice in my career and thats lucky (Im not care home staff now).

But you said 'none of this is reported', so what do you mean, reported to who and to what end?

Each resident, child or adult should have a risk assessment about how to keep them and keep workers safe around them. Some might need 2-1 staffing in case of assault and violence. A safety plan needs to be in place about how intimate care or restraint takes place.

The benefits system needs to be tougher - you have to train in an area of work where there is a shortage to receive benefits and apply for roles when trained.

Explain how staff from Nigeria, were child sexual abuse is rife and uninvestigated, domestic violence still legal etc etc. As well as certain attitudes towards disabilities etc, are worse than people encouraged into work from this country? Do you not think that poverty is forcing Africans etc into these jobs? Why are we suddenly ignoring the need for a DBS?

I think what you’re saying here is not correct. Anyone on a care visa has no recourse to public fund, neither do their family. The only thing their children can access is school. They have to pay a surcharge so that they and their family can use the nhs, it’s not free. They can’t get any benefits, no free childcare for working parents, only the 15 hr universal one at 3 years old. So it’s not possible that only an adult is supporting the family on minimum wage, they all work, though mostly poorly paid.