When Stella Shaw left her job in the NHS in 2018 to create a home agency, she discovered that she had to advertise for months to hire staff locally in the northwest of England.
Now, each member of his team of 45 people is an international recruit on a sponsored work visa, many of whom have qualified as doctors, nurses, physiotherapist, pharmacologist and a sports scientist in their country of origin.
The government's decision in 2022 to open a immigration The path of entry -level care workers has “changed the landscape” in the sector, where a quarter of workers are non -American nationals. The visa costs she pays, in addition to the required annual salary of £ 25,000, is worth it, she says. “It is actually more profitable because they are reliable.”
But care providers are now faced with a brutal adjustment, after the announcement of this week that recruitment abroad in care will end in a few months, as part of a broader repression of immigration.
Too many workers since 2022 had been “subject to shameful levels of abuse and exploitation”, The government saidArriving to find himself “sought by the debt, unjustly treated … or discover that the jobs that were promised to them did not exist”.
Some economists say that there are good reasons to close a visa route that has left workers who are not very vulnerable to exploitation, but without obligation to work on long -term care.
“Work visas with a settlement do not work for jobs where migrant demand comes from bad wages and conditions,” said Alan Manning, LSE professor and head of the government's advisory committee. “Those who came to a visa of care workers and worked in social care for five years can be still 50 years old in the United Kingdom.”
Care leaders, however, say that there is no immediate alternative to international recruitment given the long -standing financing pressures in the sector that prevent them from increasing wages.
Shaw says that his local authority in Chester is relatively generous in the hourly rate he offers to providers. But many advice came at auction with small packets of care at the lowest tenderer in a manner that leaves suppliers unable to plan in advance or to group customers significantly in a small geographical area.
Staff “has always been the big concern” even before the COVVI-19 pandemic, said Darren Stapelberg, general manager of Grosvenor Health and Social Care Group, one of the largest suppliers in the United Kingdom. After the pandemic, professional exhaustion led to a “massive change” in the hours of British personnel wanted to work, and a sharp drop in the number willing to use its own cars for customer visits, he said.
About two-thirds of the 6,000 Grosvenor staff were recruited in the United Kingdom, said Stapelberg, many of whom were not British nationals but who had moved to the country and settled. But among the 900 employees who had started in the past year, only 67 were local recruits. The opening of the Visa route “has maintained and stabilized our business,” he said.
The ministers argue that the closure of the route will not change the sector in a new crisis, because until 2028, employers will be able to hire from a migrant basin already in the United Kingdom. This group includes students, recent graduates and approximately 40,000 care workers who have been moved previously hired by “thugs” employers who have been stripped of their license to sponsor visas.
But charitable organizations and care providers say that if many displaced workers need support, helping them find new care jobs is not easy.
“We have found a range of obstacles to which the government was not frank,” said Dora-Olivia Vicol, director general of the Work Rights Center, who interviewed many affected migrants, as well as regional criticisms that the government finances to match workers to jobs.
Some people were surfing and could not afford to move for a new job, she said. Some had fallen pregnant and gave birth since his arrival. Others had no driving license in the United Kingdom and wanted to work in a care home, while most vacant posts were in home care.
Meanwhile, regional hubs often only offered one “glorified job fair,” said Vicol, and care providers were “reluctant” to hire people whose previous employers had been violent to the point of violence, considering them as “damaged goods”.
Providers say that migrants who are still looking for work are often not suitable for care and that driving capacity is a large barrier, given the logjams of the test system. The Zimbabweans have had an advantage over other nationalities, because they lead on the same side of the road as the United Kingdom and their licenses are valid.
“People have gone to the swimming pool … are not necessarily a good choice,” said Camille Leavolt, director general of Abbots Care, a supplier based at Hertfordshire.
About 100 of its 580 employees are international hiring, several of which have gone from abusive employers, but it says: “It is not only a job. You really need to want to worry about it, very focused on the person, to see what to do and how to communicate with a customer. ”
Stapelberg says that Grosvenor receives requests from around 600 migrants inappropriate each week, interviewing 100 and by finding only seven with the required driver's license, communication skills and skills.
The longer -term objective is to generate wages and standards in the sector thanks to a new collective negotiation mechanism, without any plan on the way of stimulating the financing of the sector. But providers say that it will not take long for the endorship strains to reappear.
“None of us believes that we can maintain our operations without a form of immigration,” said Raina Summerson, Managing Director of Agincare, a supplier on the UK level.
“At the end of the summer, it will be horrible,” said Leavold, who sees vacant positions increasing, and thinks that in December, hospitals will again make bed blockages because they cannot safely unload patients. “This is the only time anyone cares about social care.”
