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?

In that case care workers need better qualifications and training. A lot are very sweet, kind, caring people but not terribly highly educated in disabilities and dementia.

Care work ends up a dumping ground for people without qualifications. Old people / people with learning disabilities deserve very skilled qualified people to get the best from them.

You xant just shout to pay people more. Also care home fees are obscene.it doesn't correlate with low paid staff. That is all shades of wrong.

Same for nursery workers. The verbal grammar of staff at one nursery we viewed was awful. Many don't understand child development and child psychology.

We ultimately opted for a pre school in an independent school with qualified teachers teaching from 2 years old, so that we had educated people around our children.

To be fair, I had all my training paid for.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/in_the_news/5287824-woman-secretly-filming-her-mum-being-abused-in-a-care-home-distressing-content

My post from that thread also resonates here.

JenniferBooth · 09/03/2025 17:34

Ed Davey was on This Morning recently with a woman whose mum was abused in a care home.
They had a debate about what could be done to stop this kind of abuse.
But the one thing that wasnt brought up is the one thing no Govenment will ever do including the Lib Dems if they ever got in.
And that is to stop care work being advertised through Job Centres or stop ppl being threatened with UC sanctions if they dont take a care position. Stopping Job Centres doing this will stop someone possibly taking their resentment out on the clients (not saying everyone forced by sanction would do this) just saying its a risk. Why is it ok for elderly people to be collateral damage to get unemployment figures down. They would never take the same risks with children by forcing the claimant to be a child minder or be sanctioned.
I realise this is not what you were talking about but it all ties into the fact that the job is not valued.

Clearly you need to be a nice kind person to work in care and not that it's an either or ... but education and training is more important than empathy. I'd rather my GP understood medicine and science over being sweet but thick.

I think it is a very dangerous road to start down to force anyone to work in any caring role, I also agree with PP about the need to be physically fit for caring roles. I am very worried about a young woman I know who is returning to a job in a care home after maternity leave, she already has back problems and struggles to lift things or get off the floor.

@notanothernamechange24 Not all businesses are equal. You didn’t start a supermarket chain or an energy company. Bad luck you didn’t really. Do you have a pension? Is it invested in stocks and shares? You need others to make money don’t you? Also people who earn well might be spending their money with you. You can make money out of them! It all goes round in the economy and you benefit as you are not a charity.

In that case care workers need better qualifications and training. A lot are very sweet, kind, caring people but not terribly highly educated in disabilities and dementia.

while I do agree that more training would be good I think we need to remember that pay is not always commensurate to qualifications. 20 odd years ago I was working a manual labour job with no qualifications. I earned over 40k a year which for the late 1990s was a good wage, especially as I was early 20s. I was paid that rate because people didn’t want to do the job so that’s what they needed to pay in order to get people to do the job. Obviously the added issue with the home sector is the fact the industry claims poverty. How true this is I have no idea, is it just a case of the company owners wanting to maximise profits?

Thank goodness Labour are making inroads into the mess the country is in - so much needs done but at least it’s a start.

Really? How is a care home going to attract staff other than pay more. How will LAs deal with this and what happens to blocks in the NHS when people find it harder to get care

I think they’re chasing Reform but I doubt this will gain votes, it’ll likely rebound for them.

Just as long as it doesnt involve working with MNers kids eh.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5326040-childcare-is-not-a-dumping-ground-for-the-unemployable?page=1

Residents won't suffer. When homes can't fill posts they will pay £££ for agency, and this will motivate them to advertise roles with a living wage. It's a supply and demand problem ultimately, care is more valuable than providers want it to be.

I'm a nurse and I worked in care homes as a carer 15 years ago. There's alot going for care work; flexible hours and a rewarding job. They just need to treat staff with respect and pay fairly, and these profit making care providers need to be forced to do this.

And then residents can be cared for by a genuinely diverse team. Wherever I've worked providers have sourced workers from one country, I.e. only from Nigeria or only from the Philippines. I love working with people from different backgrounds but everyone being from one place isn't a healthy dynamic for anyone.

As a country we need to pay people fairly for care. The media hammering about the NHS below inflation payrise has been a farce after a decade of pay freezes.

i’ve visited a relative in a care home with staff to. overseas working overnight , residents are elderly, a lot deaf , and can’t make out what staff are saying to them , eg asking if they want a cup of tea , so staff don’t leave them anything which doesn’t help with their hydration. I also heard of a foreign worker going on a night out and sending a random friend in to cover the shift , hoping no one would notice , these old folk are vulnerable and it is a very unsafe situation

It’s such an important job and good care is something we all want for ourselves. DM was in a care home for years and frequently couldn’t understand her carers because they spoke with such strong accents or on occasion barely spoke English at all. There’s was no way on earth care plans were read and the paperwork must have been completed by different people too. We had some fantastic carers and some who were so ill suited to the job it was painful. It’s long overdue for care work to become a qualified profession that people aspire to be a part of and I guess this has to start somewhere.

I used to work in care homes and on a social housing thread ive just been told that i live in SH because i chose to be poor. So there you have it folks No wonder Brits dont want to do it No respect from the public either

The speech clarity is really important. Especially for people with learning disabilities and the elderly.

I agree with them on this, I worked in a business centre where in 2022 and 2023 the numbers coming in to sort visas from Nigeria, Phillipines, Ghana, South Asia under the care shortage roles was really nuts - rather rich of Chris Philp in opposition to say it needs to be far tighter- his gvt virtually had open doors in their rush to try and hide the fact that Brexit had decimated staffing in certain industry’s- my own feeling is many of those coming for care roles ( who could bring the whole family at that time) would not be working on it long term -

we do need care workers but it needs to be unskilled , paid better and rogue operators made to up their game .

I get the wanting to up pay but LAs are struggling with NI already and this will impact them?

Absolutely, and when supporting non verbal people, you have to be able to really understand what they may need and be able to clearly speak to them. Just because they can't verbally speak to you doesn't mean you shouldn't speak to them. We had a man with such a thick Indian accent (and poor English) that honestly most of us support workers couldn't understand him so I always did think it was very unfair on the residents who would likely struggle more to understand him. He seemed like a very sweet man but absolutely in the wrong role.

The LAs should be given additional funding in the short term, but I doubt they will.

I don't think it will be an easy ride but the current system is so broken and precarious any change is going to mean delays.

If it was up to me I'd nationalise care. Agencies are costing the earth.

A lot has changed in the past 15 years. Don’t assume your experience working back then is how things are now.
There is no one to fill vacancies and there is no money to pay agencies. Care agencies are letting people go and letting clients down left right and centre.

Yeah cos obviously there’s 10 million genuine disabled people who can work full time covering 24 hours?
And there’s single mothers who should also take full time jobs covering 24 hours?
You sound terribly bitter that some groups of society might need jobs to offer more flexible working hours, which currently are rare in the care sector.

Not only that, but many of them actively try to screw over their staff - like taking money out of their wages to pay for their training and accreditation, which is actually paid for by the government in most cases. It's outright fraud, and it's happening all over the place.

We're talking up to a grand per employee, probably twice (once on employment, and again on the transition to senior) which is peanuts for the home but huge for the carers because of the poverty wages.

Ok so ban people who want to come to the UK and work in this sector? But let boatloads of young Middle Eastern men come in and put them all up in hotels? This Gov is barking mad. There are certain nationalities who have come to the UK , have worked hard and have improved life for their families while contributing to the country. They benefit this country more than some of the British wasters we have here.

Bringing in carers from abroad is a classic example of a short-term saving that costs much more in the long-run. Caring jobs are obviously low paid - that’s the problem - so as soon as a carer has been here for five years and gets ILR, they instantly qualify for social housing and Universal Credit, for the rest of their lives. Additionally, there has never been an age limit imposed on the visa, meaning carers in their mid to late fifties and even sixties can move to the UK, work five years as a carer, and then live off the British state for the rest of their lives. Adding more people to our already extremely strained dependency ratio is far from ideal.