A new immigration surge for social care is a Brexit betrayal

We all know that social care has not been “fixed” despite the billions flowing from the Health and Social Care levy. It is one of the big three Government failures of the past decade along with complacency about the energy crunch and the housing disappointment.

But the Government’s plan for an emergency “overseas hiring spree” for social care, as reported on Friday, is exactly the wrong answer to a potential winter emergency.

First, while people object least of all to migration for health and social care purposes the overseas hiring will still be adding to a current immigration surge – about 1 million visas for work, study and family settlement have been issued in the past year – poised to send immigration anxiety back to pre-Brexit levels.

If we are returning to net immigration of 300,000 a year, on top of that all too visible stream of illegal channel crossers, it won’t be long before a UKIP-type party re-emerges to add to the new Tory leader’s headaches.

Second, we have a civilisational need to raise the status of care in our society, and not just to end the recruitment crisis. For various reasons including limited bargaining power and the difficulty of measuring care work it has always been hard for carers to capture the full value of their work to society. The old solution was to prevent women doing much else. Now that constraint has been removed we are floundering.

Not all parts of the care economy suffer low pay and status, consider doctors and even, relatively speaking, nurses. But nursery care and social care are true Cinderellas.

The ONS puts the social care workforce at over 1 million with estimated vacancies running at 100,000-plus and annual staff turnover more than 30 per cent. Many staff are paid at the National Living Wage of £9.50 an hour and the introduction of the latter has had the perverse effect, for care, of reducing any premium the sector once enjoyed over the less stressful work of, say, a shop worker.

The market cannot adjust to this shortage by raising pay because it is constrained by what the Government allocates to local authorities and the private providers they in turn delegate care to.

Almost everyone agrees this system needs redesigning around a better paid more professionalised workforce. But opening up to a new wave of immigration – and almost all care jobs are already open to foreign recruitment – just perpetuates the low-pay status quo and, as the Migration Advisory Committee put it in April, is “highly damaging” longer term to the sector.

Moreover, it’s rank hypocrisy for the Government to argue that British employers must pay and train people better, rather than reach for the immigration tap, and then do exactly that themselves.

Finally, even accepting that the fresh start we need won’t come in time for the winter crunch there are other things that could be done to make the work more attractive to British people.

Why not suspend NI payments for employees in the sector? Or appeal to the care idealism revealed by the recent increases in applications for nursing degrees and design a special scheme to attract under 25s into the sector for a minimum of two years, rewarded with a big discount on university fees or similar benefit.

Also, as Richard Reeves says in his new book Of Boys and Men, we are trying to solve the care recruitment crisis with only half the workforce. Just 15% of front-line care workers are men. Wouldn’t many directionless young men respond to a ‘your country needs you’ appeal to work in the sector, especially if there was the future promise of proper pay and career progression?

David Goodhart works at the Policy Exchange think tank and is writing a book about the undervaluing of care work