The full impact of the decision to stop hiring care workers from overseas will emerge when staff are under winter pressures, the co-chair of the National Care Association has warned.
From today, social care visas are no longer being issued, after the government announced the end of the route in May as part of immigration reforms.
They were first introduced in 2022 by Boris Johnson’s government, in an effort to solve the collapse in recruitment that followed Brexit.
The scheme largely worked, with a trend of rising vacancies in the care sector dramatically reversing in the years that followed.
Nadra Ahmed, who has chaired the NCA for more than 20 years, told Metro the visa plan had several flaws from the start – but as it comes to an end, the crisis in recruitment has not gone away.
Speaking the day after an appearance at the Covid inquiry, she described the decision from Yvette Cooper’s Home Office as ‘knee-jerk’ and made ‘on the hoof’.
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She said: ‘We’re already facing quite a substantial financial crisis, and now we’re being thrown back into a workforce-related crisis which has only been stemmed for a short period of time, and we’re going to start to see challenges again.’
While the social care visa scheme did bring down vacancies, it also led to a widespread reliance on overseas workers in the sector.
Announcing the plans to cut it off three months ago, the Home Office said it would help ‘restore order, control and fairness to the system, bring down net migration and promote economic growth’.
The department also pointed out many of those who arrived on the visa ended up ‘subject to shameful levels of abuse and exploitation’ by those who hired them.
Some even arrived in the UK only to find the role they had been promised didn’t exist, after paying huge amounts of money to come over.
Hundreds of rogue care providers had their licence to sponsor international staff torn up between the launch of the visa in 2022 and March this year.
Around 40,000 people have ended up displaced in the UK without a job in care as a result, and the Home Office has said these people will be used to stem recruitment challenges until ‘homegrown talent’ can be trained up.
But Nadra said it might not be easy to find work for these people, despite the existence of around 131,000 vacancies in the sector.
She explained: ‘I think it goes back to this belief that anybody can do social care, anybody can deliver social care, which is not true.
‘You have to be highly skilled and have huge qualities that make you want to work in social care and drive you towards it and build your confidence and work through it.
‘So if people have come across, for example, who just wanted to get here and get into a role so that they keep in the UK, they may not have the skills, but they will have been able to get paperwork that told us they could.’
Ultimately the impact of the move could differ across the country, she said: some parts of the UK have as much as 60% of care staff on visas, while others are much lower.
And it may take time for the full extent of the challenge to become apparent, as ‘the erosion becomes visible after a period of time’.
Nadra said: ‘I suspect when we get to the stage of winter, we might start to see some challenges if the workforce isn’t there to deliver care at home.’
Metro has contacted the Home Office for comment.
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