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Priti Patel has been urged by a Tory MP to create a care and hospital workers’ immigration scheme to avoid a “gaping hole” being left in the sectors’ low-paid jobs.
Sir Roger Gale told HuffPost UK the scheme could be modelled on the seasonal agricultural workers’ scheme that will allow low-skilled migrants to continue to come to the UK after the Brexit transition.
Gale is the first Tory to raise concerns about the home secretary’s new points-based immigration system, which will come into force after the Brexit transition period ends on December 31.
Patel faced criticism when it emerged that a new NHS and care visa would still exclude low-paid social care workers and hospital ancillary staff like porters and cleaners.
It came amid increased focus on care and hospital workers who have played vital frontline roles during the coronavirus pandemic.
According to the Office for National Statistics, almost 30,000 more care home residents died during the outbreak than during the same time period last year.
Gale, who is the first Tory to speak out since Patel unveiled the rules on Monday, said he had “real concern” about the care sector because “what we actually need and rely on very heavily is imported ancillary workers”.
“What concerns me is we could be left with a gaping hole in the provision of the people who do the messy jobs,” he told HuffPost UK.
“Care workers in residential homes, hospital staff doing sluices and all the muck that the Brits won’t do.
“It worries me that we may find ourselves, having warned about it, light of the people we need to do the jobs that have to be done.”
Gale said a care workers’ immigration scheme could allow low-skilled staff to come to the UK on two-year rolling visas to fill job vacancies.
Unlike fruit-pickers, they would need to speak English.
They would also need to have a clean criminal record, while experts could work out exactly how many people are required, Gale suggested.
He expressed doubts about ministers’ claims that British people would step up to fill gaps as foreign care workers currently in the UK return to their home countries.
“There may in the short-term be quite a significant pool of unemployed labour because of Covid but that doesn’t mean they are going to do these jobs, and if they do they won’t want to do it for long,” he said.
“You’re going to have to pay them a lot more and if you pay them a lot more you have got to find the money because it is not there in the care home system.
“There’s a fond belief that care homes are a licence to print money, they are not, they are operating on the margins.
“They pay low wages because they can’t pay any more, in most cases.”
It is understood that the door has not been completely shut on care workers, with the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) currently reviewing the shortage occupation list.
People coming to the UK for jobs on that list will find it easier to get a visa under Patel’s new immigration rules than they would otherwise.
But Home Office sources highlighted immigration minister Kevin Foster’s defence of the new visa in the Commons.
He told MPs on Monday: “We support our care workers.
“Senior care workers will qualify under the new points-based system.
“People will look at what has happened over the past few months and surely they will not think that our vision for the social care sector should be to carry on looking abroad to recruit at or near the minimum wage.
“We need to be prioritising jobs in this country.”
Foster also insisted there was unlikely to be a labour shortage next year given the mass unemployment predicted to follow the coronavirus crisis.
“It is hard to believe that many will believe that there is a labour shortage,” he said.
“We engage regularly with the care sector and we listen to what it says.
“Our priority is that in future these jobs will be valued, rewarded and trained for, and that immigration should not be an alternative.”