Care for elderly and infirm people will be put at risk if the government presses ahead with plans to block entry to the UK for low-paid workers from the EU, leaders in the sector have warned.
They say Britain will miss out on desperately needed staff unless the government changes the proposed salary threshold for immigrants post-Brexit and classifies care workers as skilled.
Care workers can earn as little as £16,000, according to the National Association of Care and Support Workers (NACSW), well short of the £26,500 threshold under the immigration system the government plans to introduce next year. In addition, some workers will be classified as unskilled and ineligible for entry.
The care sector employs around 1.6 million people and has a shortage of 110,000 staff, according to a Skills for Care report published in October.
Karolina Gerlick, the chief executive of NACSW, said shutting out workers at this time was irresponsible. “There is going to be a human cost to this, people will die because people who need care workers won’t be able to get them and there won’t be enough of us to deliver that care,” she said.
Nadra Ahmed, the executive chair of the National Care Association, noted that care workers had been classed as low skilled along with fruit pickers but the latter would get special treatment to keep supermarket shelves stocked.
“I feel really saddened that fruit workers come above that group,” she said. “We are not low-skilled workers. We work in palliative care, with people with dementia and disabilities. In hospitals, nurses who are highly trained administer medicine. In care homes, trained care workers do that. How can you say that is unskilled?
“The NHS has outsourced social care and end-of-life care for years. When I started in 1981 you would not have taken anybody who was incontinent, doubly incontinent or with dementia. Now, this is what the care sector does. We are really a mini-hospital scenario.”
She and other leaders in the sector say care work must be included on the list of skilled jobs and the list of occupations that are short of staff.
The government has adopted recommendations from the migration advisory committee on allocating points to potential immigrants based on their skills, salary and English-language proficiency.
Gerlick said the committee’s report was unhelpfuland showed a lack of understanding about care workers’ skills.
“In terms of skills, we have three types: organisational skills, dealing with stakeholders; clinical skills; and soft skills of empathy and patience. They talked about getting British employers to automate. Well you can’t get a robot to do this.”
Around 8% of staff in the sector come from the EU, and the proportion is higher in cities. Gerlick said care homes had layers of other staff who became part of residents’ network of companions and were an important part of every social care model.
Ahmed said the staff shortages had been 10 years coming and the issue was not Brexit-related. “I can understand why the government is using Brexit as a lever on immigration but it would be better if they talked about providing staff in the care sector in the short, medium and long term, rather than ruling them out completely,” she said.
The migration advisory committee report that informed the government’s immigration policy noted that the social care sector was “struggling to recruit and retain workers” but cited a “failure to offer competitive terms”.
It said its view was that low pay was not an immigration issue despite argument for special treatment for a sector that was perceived as “lower paid but higher value”.
