New immigration rules will be a disaster for social work
Tough new immigration rules will deter overseas social workers from coming to the UK, adding to the profession's recruitment crisis, sector leaders warn.
The government this month announced a five-point plan to curb immigration and stop overseas workers from bringing family to the UK.
Under the new rules:
- Skilled overseas workers will need to earn at least £38,700 to be eligible for a skilled worker visa
- Health and social care workers will be banned from bringing family dependents to the UK, as will overseas students
- The minimum income a person can earn to apply for a family visa has risen from £18,600 to £38,700
- The 20 per cent salary discount for shortage occupations will be scrapped along with the Shortage Occupation List to be replaced by a new Immigration Salary List. This will include a 'general threshold discount'
- The annual health surcharge for foreign workers will increase from £624 to £1,035
The measures, to be introduced next April, come as the vacancy rate in children's social work in England increased by a record 21 per cent to 7,900 vacancies in 2022, meaning one in five posts were vacant. The vacancy rate in adult services was 11.6 per cent, equal to 2,000 posts unfilled.
In social care, there was a 52 per cent rise in vacancies in 2021-22, currently standing at 152,000. Poor pay and working conditions, high caseloads and lack of resources leading to stress and burnout have repeatedly been cited as reasons in BASW surveys for social workers quitting or signing up with recruitment agencies.
To plug the gaps, local authorities have turned to international recruitment. The number of overseas social workers applying to practice in England rose by 175 per cent between 2019/20 and 2021/22. In London alone, 70,000 care workers have been recruited from abroad.
John McGowan, general secretary of the Social Workers Union, criticised the government for "creating new barriers" in social work without addressing existing problems undermining recruitment and retention.
He said: "Despite rising need, social work is experiencing a staffing crisis, with the highest number of vacancies in five years. Poor working conditions are driving burnout and causing social workers to quit in record numbers."
McGowan added the ban on bringing family dependents to the UK would deter people with valuable social work skills coming to the UK.
“If you're starting a difficult job in a new country – for example, a role with large and complex caseloads, high pressure, limited control, and a lack of support – you're not going to want to go back to an empty home after work, with no support network and separated from your loved ones.
"International social workers and students bring valuable life experience and maturity to our profession should be welcomed with open arms. Instead, new immigration laws are denying them a family life and lightening their wallets."
Rachael Wardell, chair of workforce development at the Association of Directors of Children's Services (ADCS), said: “It is no secret that local authorities up and down the country are facing growing challenges in recruiting and retaining staff in children’s and adult social care.
"For us these challenges are most pressing in social work and other shortage occupations and international staff make a valuable contribution to our communities and organisations.
"In children’s services we work hard to keep families together wherever safely possible, therefore, it feels perverse that changes to the UK Health and Care visa could separate overseas workers and their families and this may discourage overseas workers from taking up roles in the sector.”
BASW also criticised the plan. In a statement, the association said: "We firmly oppose the Government’s plans, which fail to recognise the significant contribution of overseas workers in filling the many vacant roles in our health and social care services, whilst also denying those same workers the opportunity to be with their families."
The government has said it wants more UK workers to step into roles filled by overseas workers, but low pay is driving vacancies across the social work and social care.
Many councils are unable to meet the new minimum wage for social care workers and can’t compete with sectors offering more money, such as retail.
Mel Lock, head of adult social care at Somerset Council said: "We know that we need overseas workers to be able to support [the sector] but they may not come to this country if they can't bring their families.
"We would love to pay our workforce more. We know that the national living wage has gone up, which in Somerset alone is an additional £5 million that we need to find. That will be really difficult if we don't get adequate new funding from the government.”
Government's migration advisers have identified "persistent underfunding" of local councils as the main factor in the current staffing crisis.
Dr Madeleine Sumption, director of the Migration Observatory at Oxford University, said raising the family income threshold to £38,700 for workers from overseass would negatively impact on recruitment in social care.
“This threshold determines whether British citizens can bring a foreign partner to live with them in the UK, and the level has been more than doubled,” she said.
“The largest impacts will fall on lower-income British citizens, and particularly women and younger people who tend to earn lower wages.”
Professor Martin Green, chief executive of Care England, said: “If the government now wants to move away from international recruitment as the solution to fixing the social care workforce crisis, it must act swiftly and invest in improving the pay and conditions to drive domestic recruitment.”
Recent figures from Social Work England's State of the Nation report 2023 show:
- The number of overseas workers applying to practice in the UK increased by 175 per cent between 2019/20 and 2021/22
- There were 1,684 applications in 2021-22 from social workers living abroad. More than half of these applications came from South Africa, Zimbabwe and India
- In the past year, nearly 70,000 overseas workers entered the social care workforce, after the government added care workers and home carers to its shortage occupation list in 2022
- This led to a rise from 113 to 40,416 workers issued with health and care visas between 2021-22 and 2022-23
- The number of senior care workers rose from 6,763 to 17, 250, meaning in total 50,790 more staff came from overseas on a health and care visa – 45 per cent were from India, Zimbabe and Nigeria
The migration plan comes after official figures last month showed net migration had soared to a record 745,000 in 2022.
In a statement to MPs, home secretary James Cleverley said migration to the UK "needs to come down" adding there has been "abuse" of health and care visas for years.
"Immigration policy must be fair, legal, and sustainable,” he said.