“A crushing blow” is how Care England described government plans to scrap the social care visa scheme, which allows carers from abroad to work in the UK.
It is a move which care providers say makes the crisis in social care even worse.
Read more: Care homes face ban on overseas recruitment
The government admits that social care is on its knees. But that’s nothing new.
For decades, social care has creaked under the pressure of an ageing population.
Restricting staffing during a staffing crisis has a lot of care providers worried.
They say they struggle to recruit from within the UK and have become more and more reliant on foreign workers.
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Like in the NHS, there is a chronic shortage of carers, with an estimated 70,000 domestic care workers leaving the sector over the last two years.
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But this is not the first time that changes to immigration rules have impacted the care sector.
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In 2023, changes led to a dramatic 70% fall in international recruitment in just three months.
Providers say that without access to international workers, there is a real risk of significant workforce shortages.
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That means that providers cannot meet this growing demand for care, which undermines the quality of care for thousands of people across the UK.
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Skills for Care, the organisation that monitors the workforce in the sector, estimates that an additional 540,000 care workers will be needed by 2040 to meet population needs.
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This raises critical questions about where these workers will come from if neither the funding nor the migration route exists.
Caught in the middle: the old and vulnerable.
