UK faces massive shortage of caregivers and the aged will suffer the most

If you are an ageing Brit looking for a care worker to help you carry out everyday tasks, good luck finding an affordable resource anytime soon.

Care homes in the UK are closing down in large numbers, and the government seems to have little interest in reversing the trend.

In fact, the government is the reason why the adult social care sector has a shortage of workers.

The number of visas that the UK government granted to health and care workers in April-June dropped to 6,564, down 81 percent from 35,470 in the same period a year ago.

The fall in the number of visas for the dependents of those care workers was 66 percent over the same period.

“The decline is undoubtedly linked to the previous government’s decision in late 2023 to stop allowing migrant care workers to bring family members with them,” said Majella Kilkey, professor of social policy at the University of Sheffield.

The last Tory government cut the number of visas for dependents of care workers as part of the Conservatives’ plan to deliver the biggest-ever reduction in net migration, meaning the difference between inward and outward flows of workers.

In December 2023, then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced a wide-ranging plan to cut net migration, which aimed at keeping away around 300,000 workers who would otherwise have been eligible to enter the UK under the old set of rules.

As a result, care workers have been unable to bring their spouses and children with them to the UK since March.

Too reliant on foreign workers

Thanks to advances in medical science, people in the UK are living longer than before.

But old age does not necessarily translate to healthier sunset years when people rely heavily on care workers to help them maintain hygiene and meet mobility challenges.

The adult social care sector in the UK consists of around 18,000 organisations across 39,000 care-providing locations with 1.6 million filled posts.

One in every five members of the adult social care workforce is non-British. It means the country cannot meet the demand for care workers domestically.

According to the latest State of the Adult Social Care Sector and Workforce report, 9.9 percent of positions in the care industry were vacant in 2022-23, which is equivalent to 152,000 vacancies being advertised on an average day.

“If the workforce grows in line with demographic changes, we are going to need an extra 440,000 roles by 2035… What that tells us is that we cannot get enough people today, we are losing a lot of experienced staff, and we are going to need a lot of additional people working in social care in the medium to long-term,” said Oonagh Smyth, CEO of Skills for Care, a workforce development and planning body for adult social care in England.

For many reasons—including poor salaries and supposedly “low status of care work” owing to its association with women and racial minorities—employers look towards other countries to hire care workers.

Before 2000, a majority of foreign care workers came from the former colonies of Britain. But then the EU inducted central and eastern European nations as its members, paving the way for their care workers to move to the UK for the next two decades.

However, the exit of the UK from the EU in 2020 marked a reversal in the trend. Former colonies like India, Nigeria and Zimbabwe once again became the top sources for the UK’s adult social care sector.

The situation is unlikely to improve as the current Labour government has indicated its unwillingness to a course correction.

“This government is clear that net migration must come down… immigration must not be used as an alternative to tackling skills shortages and labour market failures here in the UK,” Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said.

Restricting the ability of care workers to bring dependents with them is a policy that the Labour government “supports” and will “continue to implement” going forward, she said.