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The UK’s social care sector has been rocked by a scandal of epic proportions, with shocking revelations of widespread abuse of the social care visa system.
David Neal, the chief inspector of borders and immigration, has blown the lid off the Home Office’s handling of the social care visa route since its inception in 2022. The visa was meant to plug a ‘labour gap’ in the care sector, but it’s been hijacked by opportunists for their own gain.
Neal’s report exposes jaw-dropping details: the Home Office issued 275 visas to a care home that didn’t even exist! And another 1,234 visas were granted to a company that claimed to have only four workers when it got its license (to recruit care workers from overseas). That’s over 1,500 migrants who’ve slipped through the cracks, pretending to be care workers. We suspect this is only the top bit of the iceberg.
The care worker visa was supposed to be a lifeline for the care industry, helping homes look after our aging population. But it’s turned into a backdoor for low-skilled workers from poor countries to move to Britain with their families intent on settling in the UK.
The result has been chaos, with the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority launching 17 investigations into the care sector last year.
Moreover, residents of care homes have been let down by low-quality staff. In one case, an elderly woman died because the staff couldn’t communicate properly with emergency services about a stair lift accident.
The government has promised to fix things, by stopping care workers from bringing dependants and making sure sponsors are better regulated. But the Migration Advisory Committee says the only real solution is to pay British care workers higher salaries. It might sound strange, but boosting wages for our own workers could actually be cheaper in the long-run than importing tens of thousands of foreign workers. It would ease the pressure on housing and infrastructure, improve the retention of staff and improve the quality of care.
This government and its predecessors going back to 2010, promised to cut immigration. Not only have they done the opposite but have done it intentionally. Migration Watch warned in 2018, 2019 and 2020, when the future immigration system was being discussed, what the consequences of looser control (i.e. lower qualification and salary thresholds, no local advertising of jobs, no limits, employers and universities given a free hand to bring as many people as they wished and so on) would be. Well, the chickens are, spectacularly, coming home to roost. This social care visa fiasco must end, now.
This is a preview of Migration Watch’s free weekly newsletter. Please consider signing up to the newsletter directly, you can do so here and will receive an email copy of the newsletter every Friday as soon as it is released.