It's yet another sign of how far Labour has come from its international socialist roots: Labour is going to scrap the care visa as a route into the UK for foreign care workers...
However while this might seem on the surface to be of benefit to British workers, who presumably will 'step up' (along with some AIs) and plug the gaps, scrapping the Care-Worker Visa could be a costly mistake
Even with the current care visa in place, the social care sector is already suffering a recruitment crises: there are over 130,000 jobs to fill and there is no clear plan to replace the gap left by leaving migrant workers.
This seems to be a case of Labour bowing to populism by stopping this particular type of migrant, yet without any real idea of how to mitigate the consequences....
A Sector Based on Foreign Labour
England's social care sector relies heavily on foreign labour, the legions of the British unemployed simply aren't interested in filing these jobs. The scale of dependence is huge: nearly 58,000 overseas care workers were brought in during 2023 alone under the visa scheme which is soon to be scrapped.
The covid years give us some idea of the level of dependency, when there was extremely limited migration: vacancy rates during 2020/21 were over 10%, without a stream of new recruits through the care Visa scheme.
Who Will Fill the Gap?
The government are lazily resting on the assumption that domestic workers are going to fill these gaps.... however, care work is low paid given how physically and emotionally draining it can be, and it is also extremely low status.
The whole industry needs a overhaul to make it work better.... maybe higher tiers of carers, with more prospects for promotions for more experience... I mean there's all sorts of processional therapeutic services people in care need, there is the possibility of having specialist training pathways linked to career roles, that would be a start. With obviously higher pay the further up you go, people need more than just minimum wage and no prospects for 30 years.
Gambling with the quality of life of the vulnerable....
Without a plan in place to fill the gap that's going to be created to this knee-jerk reaction to Reform there is going to be increasing strain on the social care sector and the people who are ultimately going to pay the price are your parents, if they need to go into care.
Final thoughts...
What's especially crap about this policy announcement is that there is a social care review, but it's been batted back several years, and so any potential solution to problems are going to be after the event, that's TERRIBLE governance.
In the meantime it's back to the preferred individual coping strategy of just ignoring social care and hoping like hell we or anyone we know don't end up in need of any.
So fingers crossed for a quick death while you're out doing something relatively active in your mid 80s!
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