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?

@LolaPeony I don’t think it’s as easy as just working 5 years and then “live off the British state”. And just because someone qualifies for social housing and benefits, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ll get it straightaway. There are many who end up in emergency housing and then face the risk of homelessness. Many asylum seekers and immigrants live in HMOs where they are sharing basic amenities with multiple tenants and squalid conditions because the landlords can decide on rent etc.

I was about to make the same point, most people - immigrant or not- aren’t given social housing. And yes it’s definitely the case many are living in private rent.

And people off all salary ranges can live in social housing. You don’t necessarily need to be on a low income to be “eligible” to apply anyway.

re. UC aren't we getting told all the time here people can’t just opt out of work for no good reason ? If that is in fact a thing anyone does that needs to be tackled immigrant or not.

And if people are working full time and still needing UC, again immigrant or not -that means there’s something wrong with the system and we need rent control so people can pay their own rent or we need to ensure wages are higher.

The home had a few staff from “ abroad” but they were either born here or came as younger people. One was the wonderful deputy manager. If a place is rock bottom fees, it’s rock bottom wages.

I’m a bit confused by the first line, if they’re born here surely by definition they are not staff from “abroad” ?

Unless they were born here then went abroad to be raised in another country and then came back as adults to work in a care home? @TizerorFizz that’s the only scenario I could think of!

I genuinely struggle to understand why voters on the left support:

Undercutting UK workers in low paid jobs by importing cheaper legal migration. Without that option employers would have the choice of paying higher wages or closing down. I can understand it from a right wing perspective to enable employers to pay the least they can get away with but not the left.

That this has led to 9 million people (1 in 4 of) the workforce being economically inactive. And to write these people off as being unemployable and lazy, Well being out of work for extended periods does impact your work ethic but for the right salary I'm sure many would be happy to get back into work. Again I can understand this sneering poor bashing from a right wing perspective but not left.

And lastly to describe any working class UK national for expressing any concerns about the level of legal migration as racist and thick.

It just doesn't make sense.

HOORAYYYYYY! About time. 👏 I cheered when I heard this! And now Keir Starmer is speaking live about the new rules on immigration, and how we will be controlling it, and reducing it significantly. About bloody time someone did something. We have been promised this over and over by various Governments (for YEARS now!) and no-one has done anything about it.

Hilarious though, how Labour did fuck-all about it til Reform wiped the floor with them at the local elections last week! 😆

It's spineless, like everything they've been doing so far.
Terrified of Trump? Let's do a deal that will shaft the UK just so we can get terms that are a tiny weeny bit less bad.
Terrified of Reform? Let's out-Nigel Nigel - and shaft an already ailing social care system.
Growth? Sure, let's increase NIC, that's going to help businesses hire staff (but in the meantime we should totally make sure US digital mega corps get their own tax breaks... we have the squeezed working and middle classes to cover for that)
EU? of COURSE we'll make sure all the fucking red lines and red tape remain firmly in place.

@1dayatatime I agree with your post! ^ The 'if you don't support free and uncontrolled immigration for everyone - you're a thick, uneducated, racist' trope is just water off a duck's back now. It's been said so often, by so many of 'the left,' that it goes in one ear and out of the other, when right wing/right of centre people hear this.

It's become farcical now, and I feel embarrassed for anyone who accuses people of being thick, uneducated, racists, purely for worrying about mass and uncontrolled immigration, because they just sound so pathetic with the usual predictable lines they come out with. Not a fan of Starmer, but raising a glass to him and Labour this morning, for these new immigration reforms!

I have always suspected this to be a major driver for super-rich Brexiters (and completely at odds with the average leaver's ideals, by the way). EU freedom of movement meant that EU citizens had to be treated by law the same way as British citizens. (I know there were abuses with detached workers from Eastern Europe and unscrupulous agencies exploiting them- but it was absolutely within the power of the governments at the time to address). Now, we have mostly non-EU migrants exploited in the way we see and Starmer (or Farage later on perhaps) can try and tighten the screws as much as he likes, it won't solve the problem.

I've been involved with a few recruitments for social care vacancies recently and there was 1 white person and 30 Nigerians in total who applied / went for interview.

For the right salary people would be happy to get back into work?
If there are jobs you should have to accept them - you start at the bottom and work your way up. Benefits should be refused if you don’t take a job when there is one available. Now with the change in visa rules, there will be more jobs available for British nationals

If it gets bad enough the public will stop resisting paying into a ‘care’ fund for your later years.
Whats wrong now is some people pay 100,000 and some pay zilch. it’s a ridiculous system.

Labour have gone from ‘dog whistle’ and ‘culture wars’ to ‘island of strangers’.
Reform are rattling them that much.

@Parker231

"For the right salary people would be happy to get back into work?
If there are jobs you should have to accept them - you start at the bottom and work your way up. Benefits should be refused if you don’t take a job when there is one available. Now with the change in visa rules, there will be more jobs available for British nationals"

That's how the free market works - if employers don't pay the right salary then they simply don't fill the position.

As for reforming the benefits system so that if you don't take a job when one is available then you lose your benefits then that is already the case with unemployment benefits.

In part this is what has led to the sharp increase in the number of people becoming long term sick due to mental health issues where there is no requirement to take a job and people get genuine mental health issues from the pressure to do so under the unemployment benefits system, so get signed off long term sick with mental health issues

I agree that with the change in immigration rules that there will be more jobs available for British nationals. To begin with there will be difficulty filling them with the salaries on offer. There then comes a choice between reducing benefits so that people are forced back into work or face real poverty (or turning to crime) or these employers raising the salaries on offer (or closing their businesses).

Perhaps if Yvette Cooper cleaned up her own yard first and made sure the Home Office was correctly staffed and could get on with processing visa and work permits in a timely manner so people could plan their lives. Care homes would know who they could employ whether it be locally or otherwise.

When DF was in a care home most of the staff were women with older IE teenage or older children who gave up their jobs to have their babies so were happy to work odd hours for low pay. That group of people no longer exist.

@EasternStandard

"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."

Quite simply by paying more. In a free market employers don't get the opportunity to get around this by low cost labour .

Employers tried this in the sugar plantations of the Caribbean by importing low cost labour from Africa and even provided free transport until right minded people decided that slavery was not acceptable.

How LAs and the NHS deal with this is by paying higher salaries. Yes this will result in higher costs to all of us but I would rather pay more than the insane alternative of importing cheap labour and at the same time paying benefits for 9 million UK nationals to be economically inactive.

Labour can’t win here.

They allow immigration people complain.

They clamp down on various immigration streams (which employers rely on to keep care work wages low) people complain.

We need care workers. But we also need a long term solution for how we care for the elderly without constantly bringing in people who, once they get their permanent stay will promptly look to move to a field with better pay and working conditions.

Importing carers is an interim measure - we need a long term solution.

As other posters have said, only spouses and biological children under 18 are classed as dependents. So I'm confident this is not true - as every single Zimbabwean would have to have 9 biological children under 18.

3 would be spouse plus two children, so that does seem reasonable as an average.

Yes this will result in higher costs to all of us but I would rather pay more than the insane alternative of importing cheap labour and at the same time paying benefits for 9 million UK nationals to be economically inactive.

We have an ongoing and probably enduring cost of living crisis. Paying more is simply not realistic for most. What will probably happen is that adult social care will mostly be provided for by SAHMs, like in the good old days. Women will be saddled with it. Women in fact are already disproportionately saddled with caring duties and it'll only get worse - but there's your labour gap filled. Unpaid of course.

Employers tried this in the sugar plantations of the Caribbean by importing low cost labour from Africa and even provided free transport until right minded people decided that slavery was not acceptable.

@1dayatatime

I am not sure chattel slavery, where people were literal property, is comparable to people choosing to come to the UK as care home workers….

But I agree with the broader point that capitalist systems seem to need a class of low paid / exploited people to function. And many employers use immigration, not merely to fill critical skills shortages, but to keep their profits high and avoid paying decent wages.

Preventing care homes importing workers is a good thing but in the interim there will be pain as we deal with the shortage of carers.

Some of our long term unemployed should be encouraged into the workforce.

@JHound

"Importing carers is an interim measure - we need a long term solution."

Yep - it's called paying higher wages for such jobs.

Currently we have a situation where under globalisation we import manufactured goods from China and then see manufacturing jobs in the UK disappear. These people then become economically inactive on benefits.

We then have difficulties finding people to fill service jobs that still exist but on low pay. So rather than pay up for them it's cheaper to just import the labour and so on.

The current system is unsustainable.

Getting IDL after 5 years on a low skilled visa is a bit silly frankly.

@Locutus2000 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?

Surely this is precisely why this is a good policy? Employers will not start actually paying care staff properly and improving working conditions to the point people actually want to do it while there is a cheaper alternative available. So you ban the cheaper alternative.

But who will actually pay the higher prices?

Giving indefinite leave to remain to any low skilled migrant at any point is silly. It’s fine for them to come, work and leave, but adding them to the pool of people that taxpayers are responsible for supporting just isn’t sensible.

@JHound

"Some of our long term unemployed should be encouraged into the workforce."

The number of long term unemployed is actually very low- most have transferred to incapacity benefits (often legitimately with mental health issues- being unemployed does that to you) which a) pays more and b) has no obligation to try and find a job.

But "encouraging" UK nationals back into work comes down to two levers a) paying higher wages and or b) cutting benefits.