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?

People say they would like to take a trip to Dignitas and dont want help from their kids, but I dont know anyone who has done it. My dad was a proud man who didn't want help, but he was reduced to accepting it in end stage cancer.

I think that poster has a valid point though. 50 years ago some of these jobs did not exist.

I have said preciously care work is incredibly unpopular and it’s not just the low wages. I am a high paid worker, and you could offer me an extra 30% on my current salary and I still would not want to wash elderly people’s bottoms.

50 years ago it was not a concern as most care was provided by women.

For free.

So while I think making pay and benefits for care work more attractive will help, I think people will find many choose many other jobs before they do care work (and a lot of manual low skilled jobs in the past that you could raise a family on were certain types of construction work / mining which pay fairly decently even now.)

The problem is corporates want to make profits to generate stakeholder returns.

the only options for work are not manufacturing or benefits.

the whole point of Britain being a long term developed economy is that post industrialisation means we have and should be moving to a more mental / deal based economy.

Labour intensive, physically dangerous/onerous work isn’t the only way to build and develop an economy. We need to move on.

why are we cedeing the ground to white collar jobs, which many workers from secondary economies are moving into to go back to bloody factories and back breaking work?

I agree it’s one thing for pundits to say let’s value care etc but really they’re not offering to do it, for their own family for a start. It’s someone else, often a woman they’re relying on. Low paid or not paid at all.

It’s part of the solution but not the whole solution.

Because for many jobs it’s the low wages AND the nature of the work.

And getting those wages that are high enough to cover up for the fact the work itself is incredibly offputting is not going to be a quick fix hence (care home fees will have to he high enough to pay those wages and care home owners become comfortable with far lower profits) why I said in the short to medium term we just have to prepare ourselves for dealing with the shortage in care workers which won’t erase over night. Care home work is fairly new as an industry. Previously care workers were paid nothing. It was done by women for free.

As for the manufactured goods piece, that’s consumer demand. We all have the option to buy British. People choose the cheaper option. Banning the cheaper option for goods doesn’t necessarily mean people will but locally in similar quantities.

I agree with your broad point but also think you are oversimplifying.

Yes, mucho short term pain expected.

The private ones seem to make quite a lot of profit. Perhaps they should share some with staff.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/jul/24/uk-private-care-providers-profit-rise-covid-report

The biggest rise was at Runwood Homes, where the underlying profit margin widened by 37% in 2020, and which reported a profit before tax of £25.4m, up from £15m the year before, according to the research. A quarter of its homes are rated as requiring improvement by the Care Quality Commission.
The highest margin – 41.7% – was at Avery Healthcare, up from 39.8% in 2019 and 32.5% in 2015. The company, which runs 56 care homes in the UK, was recently acquired by the Reuben Brothers, named as Britain’s second richest family with an estimated fortune of £21.5bn, in the company’s first investment in the senior care sector. A press release in March said the deal – a joint venture with US real estate investment trust Welltower Inc – was expected to “generate significant future growth opportunities”.
The findings will fuel concerns about profiteering by private providers despite the pressures of Covid, and come amid reports of cost-cutting at some chains, and continued low pay for many staff.

Why stop people arriving to do the difficult and also low paid carer jobs? Arriving to work and pay tax and social security. Plans to get unemployed benefit Brits to do this tough job? None by the look of it.

A care home manager on the radio this morning was saying that every time they advertise for staff locally they either get no replies or people who arrange an interview and don't turn up - despite apparently offering above the living wage. Salaries would have to go up pretty substantially to counteract that. In principle I don't think there's anything wrong with that, but I'm not convinced the question of funding has been properly thought through.

@ButterCrackers

"Why stop people arriving to do the difficult and also low paid carer jobs? "

Because if they weren't low paid then you wouldn't need to import cheaper labour to do these difficult jobs.

Rather than pay a higher wage to do, as you correctly point out, is a very challenging job, the corporations would rather keep their profits high by importing cheap labour

Plans to get unemployed benefit Brits to do this tough job? None by the look of it

Thank god. Who would want someone who has been forced into the role caring for them? There have been enough cases of abuse as it is.

I work in the NHS and that happens all the time, for professionally-qualified jobs with good salaries too.

That just seems to be the way things are these day, a lot of people are rude or disorganised and just don't turn up.

Given a lot of care homes are owned by hedge funds and foreign nationals maybe we should be putting a cap on profits to help pay for better training and higher wages

This is the other thing I am worried about.

There are some industries where people being miserable at having to do that work probably matters little. For care home workers then it’s a far bigger point or concern.

People don’t rush into setting up care homes either. This idea that profit can be removed isn’t the case for any business. I mean all this is assuming someone else wants to do caring more than say those posting do.

It’s hard to get staff because there’s an extra carrot for people taking visas.

People not turning up - could it be that job seekers have to prove they are seeking work. So will apply for things they don’t want.

I speak as the relative of someone, living in a care home, who gets 1:1 care all their waking hours.

Pay in the care industry is beyond our control, but we choose charities, so there’s no profit, and they tell us their care staff are the highest paid in the county.

Some classic Guardian reporting there. They are using the phrase ‘profit margin’ to obfuscate the real financial performance. As the actual accounts for these companies shows the profit after tax number is far less attractive. The Guardian article uses the same data that was used in a PP screenshot of another article, which used EBITDARM as a measure of profit. That, conveniently, excludes every major cost except staff and is therefore effectively meaningless. Knowing the profit before you covered the costs of the building, the equipment, the financing, the tax and the rent doesn’t really tell you a lot.

On that basis, Tesco is making profits of around 35%!! After the costs needed to actually run a a business it’s nearer 2% or 3% net profit after tax, but that doesn’t make a good headline…

I agree it’s a questionable stat. Even with 2 parents and a husband or wife that leaves. Very large number of children. More than is typical in modern Zimbabwe. Nevertheless, we need to tighten up on dependant visas, which make up a very high proportion of visas issued in recent years.

The Zimbabwean birth rate is 3.7 per woman, whereas the UK birth rate is 1.6 so fairly likely a Zimbabwean immigrant will have more than two children.

In my experience such staff aren't good, spitting everywhere, rude, disrespecting and mistreating very vulnerable people. You need verifiable people to look after the most vulnerable in society, not bring in who knows what from places where every qualification and certification is bought and sold and who were not typically brought up with values of empathy and respect particularly towards women, especially women of western culture. Equally the most vulnerable need someone who can communicate to an excellent standard in English.
It is a very bad idea but someone got paid to implement it and/or got kickbacks and you need to use your critical thinking and recognise problems rathet than regurgitate headlines that are also designed to make money for someone.

Not all jobs have high salaries because of the qualifications required. Compare this work to that of a nurse for example. The nurse will be paid more.

I say get people trained and into work. Not everyone has a vocation for their job.

People, especially young adults, not showing up for interviews or showing up for interview, getting the job, then not showing up seems to be pretty common now across a range of sectors.

I live south of Glasgow, and I know that local farmers can't get workers - to the point that some are considering retiring earlier than planned or leaving farming altogether because it's not sustainable or safe for them to continue alone. Local tearooms and restaurants are having the same problem, as are local trades - I've spoken to self employed joiner, mechanic and heating engineer recently who who are struggling to recruit at all or have problems with workers who simply don't bother turning up if they don't feel like it! Young adult DS has been interviewing for hospitality jobs and on one occasion recently the interviewer told him that the previous 3 candidates hadn't bothered turning up for interview.

I do actually agree that tightening dependent visas should reduce immigration overall, and possibly increase the value of immigration to the economy if it means that legal immigration will bring in a younger, childless (at the point of moving) demographic who will be net contributors for longer.

I'm just against dodgy stats!