The Government has been accused of ‘playing roulette with essential services’ over its new plans to curb immigration.

Among the measures announced yesterday by home secretary James Cleverly was a ban on  care workers from overseas bringing dependants to the UK.

The Home Office said the rules, which will need to be laid in Parliament as Immigration Rules, will be implemented in Spring 2024.

The plans ‘spell total disaster for the NHS and social care’ and ‘benefit no one’, according to the general secretary of the trade union Unison, Christina McAnea.

She added: ‘The Government is playing roulette with essential services just to placate its backbenchers and the far-right.

‘But if ministers stopped ducking the difficult issues, and reformed social care as they’ve long promised, there wouldn’t be such a shortage of workers.’

Age UK charity director Caroline Abrahams said: ‘We are worried that older and disabled people in need of care, and their families, will pay a heavy price for the Government's changes to the migration rules from next Spring.

‘It is an open secret that inward migration effectively “saved” the social care workforce last year and, as things stand, anything that undermines that source of support must be a real concern.’

Care England chief executive Professor Martin Green added: ‘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.’

According to the Home Office, the addition of carers to the UK’s immigration system was a ‘temporary measure to fill labour shortages’ following the Covid-19 pandemic, and the new measures will ‘ensure we continue to protect our NHS and social care systems’.

The Government also announced yesterday that care providers would have to register with the Care Quality Commission to sponsor migrant workers.