UK Care Workers Immigration Policy Crisis: Britain is at danger of harming the care workers on whom it relies
Labour’s immigration policies break up promise to 300,000 brought in to work in troubled industry
We are depressed, we are down. “We feel that the government is trying to take the rug out from under us,” adds David. “It’s like we are being criticised for working in an area that the government said we should come and help with.
David, not his real name, works as a care worker for persons with learning difficulties. He arrived in the east of England from Nigeria in 2022 with his wife as the Conservative government began to look to migration to solve the social care recruiting crisis.
Since then, working long shifts for less than £13 an hour, he says: “We have built relationships, we have put down roots – we have built a network.
David is one of more than 300,000 people in social care and other some low paid jobs who might potentially face a 15 year wait to be able to build a permanent home in the UK under Labour’s immigration policy.
Throughout the application process he was promised that he might apply for indefinite leave to remain (ILR) after five years, meaning that he would not be tied to the employer who sponsored his visa. His English was now at the required level and he passed the crucial Life in the UK test after swotting up on Henry VIII’s wives.
Now Labour wants to break that pledge. David, a Unison activist, is lobbying against these revisions, which is the first and most obvious problem.
Making retrospective adjustments which have such a devastating impact on people’s life is patently unfair and Angela Rayner was correct to term it ‘un-British’. Many are already waiting 10 years, according to estimates from the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), which said up to 1.3 million people currently in the UK might see their ILR wait time extended.
Another strong argument, by the IPPR and labour market economist Jonathan Portes, is that the government’s figures just don’t add up.
Home secretary Shabana Mahmood has said the moves will save £10 billion. The statistic assumes that once immigrants have leave to remain they are eligible to claim benefits and that the lower-income populations that her policies target are more likely to qualify for them.
But the government has not disclosed the workings behind the £10bn figure and Portes dug into statistics from the Migration Advisory Committee to show the advantage may be as little as £600million.
And while workers wait for settlement they would stay linked to one employer, an arrangement where they have limited negotiating power and are subject to exploitation.
This suggests a third objection to the ideas. This prolonged limbo phase – which would be 15 years for social care professionals like David, and 10 for most other migrants – is unlikely to be conducive to social integration, or to these workers’ potential to make a constructive economic contribution.
Recruitment from overseas into low-paid social care employment has finally been stopped after a surge in 2022-24, following modifications to the visa requirements. Net migration across the economy has collapsed. But the Home Office’s plan is that, for most future arrivals, the baseline qualification time for ILR should be ten years, across the economy.
That means a full 10 years of paying taxes, immigration fees and an annual levy to use the NHS with little or no option to shift between employers and improve.
For care workers who have come to the UK in response to the call, the Home Office’s intentions indicate a lengthy period of uncertainty at best. And it seems a special irony since this group – social care workers – is one that Labour has made considerable success in trying to support.
A new Fair Pay Agreement is promised, with the government leading pioneering sector-wide negotiations to improve the situation of these under-valued workers. The deal is expected to start in April 2028.
But in singling out this group for the longest wait until they belong in the UK – with high-paid workers on a speedier track – the Home Office appears to be endorsing the depreciation of this vital activity that helps explain why it is underpaid in the first place.
The goal is that better terms and conditions may attract some of the 7% of jobs in the sector that are empty – down from 10% a few years ago, thankfully – to be filled by UK-born workers.
But there is a deep contradiction in introducing progressive plans for collective bargaining in social care, whilst at a stroke of a pen making hundreds of thousands of the sector’s existing workers more economically and socially insecure.
The bottom line is that the reason why there are so many migrant care workers in the UK is that successive governments have not built an adequately funded social care system. Labour also has shamefully ducked it so far, but Louise Casey is currently following this well-worn path.
Meanwhile people like David are throwing up their life plans because of Labour’s proposals. He and his wife are once again pondering the idea of a new beginning in Canada, which they had dismissed before. “No one wants to live in a place where social care workers aren’t valued by government,” he argues. “They’re punishing us for the low wages that they themselves have created.”