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?

Parents are also counted as dependants now.

As long as you’re ok to fund it with your taxes.

I expect more of us will need to look after our own parents in our own homes. We will have no choice. I am already planning for it.

I think we need to do 1 and 2 and also do more to interrogate how many of the long term unemployed generally cannot work.

Immigration just cannot be the answer to employer exploitation.

This is only a solution for those with kids / with enough kids / who are able to do this.

As birth rates fall and many have no kids we also need to have a solution for that.

@StandFirm

"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."

Yes I agree that women are already saddled with an unfair and disproportionate share of caring duties whether that be childcare or elderly parents. Whether we import cheap labour or not is not going to change this .

What will change this is a change in attitudes by men. And to be fair compared to say 40 years ago men are taking on more childcare responsibilities (although still far from an equal share). This also needs to happen for elderly parents- yes I am prepared to do what I can for my elderly relatives but I feel under no obligation to do the same for DP's parents etc.

Even with elderly parents I don’t see how the average gets to 10

A flaw in the reasoning behind ending immigration and cheap labour in manufacturing, farming or social care is that -as we see across all developed economies- the domestic workforce does not want to do those lower skilled manual jobs. There's no appetite for them. It's the nature of the jobs as much as the remuneration. That's been happening for decades. So, what can be done? Can workers be forced into those jobs? Should the state coerce certain parts of the population to take them? That's not realistic, unless the government takes on unprecedented powers and this turns into a heavily state-regulated economy, which most people won't like.

I mean they weren’t in power to do anything about it until fairly recently….

Nor do I, but I’ve seen these number from reputable sources before. I know Norway also DNA test because they had a lot of people posing as dependants - a sister who was presented as a wife, a child who was unrelated or merely a nephew or niece.

The only way to make this work would by by raising pay substantially. I haven't seen any sign of the government offering to subsidise that, so care home costs - which are currently in the region of £5-6K a month - will rise even higher. Given that there is only so far that the value of a person's home will stretch, that will mean local authorities picking up the tab, with council tax going up. I can't see the average Reform voter being too keen on that.

@JHound

"I think we need to do 1 and 2 and also do more to interrogate how many of the long term unemployed generally cannot work."

I don't disagree but cutting benefits or "interrogating them" to the economically inactive is going to be massively unpopular with voters.

Whereas getting employers to pay more for such jobs (I don't like the term "low skilled ") is a lot easier with the electorate.

The source posted to this thread showed an average of 3?

I am the only one able to look after my mum as my only sibling is overseas. I helped look after my dad in his own home until he passed. Hopefully I will be able to do the same for my mum or move her into my home.

I don't deny it is difficult. I don't see a choice though, as the country doesnt want immigrants and British born people dont want to do this work. I see family support becoming more important.

I totally agree with you that this needs to be a shared burden between men and women in the family. The sad reality as you know is that there's still a long way to go to achieve that and - as I witnessed with my own mum caring for hers- even 'just' caring for one set of elderly parents is tremendously hard.

Yes, but I’ve seen much higher numbers before. More like 6 or 7. I don’t know where the PP got 10 from.

Yes I am. If I need care I want the people working there to have decent pay and conditions, thanks. I would hate being cared for hy someone who is hating every minute of their employment and hoping to escape as soon as possible. Only a small minority of people actually end up needing to be admitted into a care home. The majority who manage to never need this should be sharing the burden of costs.

I am not sure cutting benefits is that unpopular - they just need to do it sensibly. Maybe I am biased but being from a socially deprived background I know / have known people who never worked and it seems bonkers to me.

Cutting benefits alone would never be popular. Coupling it with pushing companies to offer better wages is a more positive solution.

Maybe they should sell it as low paid / low skill immigration is a form of social welfare and benefits for employers.

That's true - with regards to the stat mentioned then, even if you add two dependent parents, that's still an average of 7 underage biological children per Zimbabwean, so that wouldn't change my opinion on that stat being untrue.

I would actually be interested in hearing from anyone who managed to bring in a parent or grandparent though - the criteria is so tight. Entirely anecdotally I know immigrants who've brought in their children, no-one who's brought in an older relative.

Well 50 years ago you could do a "low skilled manual job" and still earn enough to afford your own modest home and feed your family.

What's happened is that such jobs no longer pay enough to enable this and benefits are financially a better option.

Now as @JHound suggests you can reform benefits to make it more financially attractive to work and or you can increase the salaries for such jobs.

Yes - I think that isn’t true. I don’t know how the data were wcrunched but I think the Reddit post I read was wrong

Ok well I will go with three pending seeing the other official sources.

Birth rates are dramatically falling across S Asia, so I find this claim of 10 dependants pp quite strange.

But it's not just money. DD is on a gap year working as a care worker in a not-for-profit organisation. The money (for a young person with no qualifications particularly) is OK - far better that she would get in retail. There are loads of training opportunities for those who want to stay long term with clear progression pathways and they are actually treated well. I'm not saying anyone would get rich working there but it would compare favourably with a number of other sectors. There is flexibility for those who can't do shifts. The work is demanding but rewarding, but they can't recruit. They have a lot of overseas workers and are completely reliant on them. DD is pretty much the only young UK person working there - all the others UK staff are much older and often women with children working part-time around school hours. We see adverts for jobs every week, and they are always struggling to get staff. Part of it might be because it is a very large institution in a relatively small town but I really worry how this ruling will impact them.

@StandFirm

"The sad reality as you know is that there's still a long way to go to achieve that and - as I witnessed with my own mum caring for hers- even 'just' caring for one set of elderly parents is tremendously hard."

It's for this very reason that I have made my children (especially my DD) promise that if they have children then on no account are they to take care of me when I get old and frail.

But instead I would much prefer a long walk on a cold snowy mountain 😀.