Melanie Weatherley MBE, co-chair of the Care Association Alliance, responds to the Government’s decision to end the recruitment of care workers from overseas.

Recruitment into adult care services has become less of a crisis recently, thanks entirely to access to international recruits.

The Skills for Care data suggests that the number of vacancies has fallen by less than the number of care staff recruited from overseas, and this is confirmed by reports from providers that while it is relatively easy to attract sponsored staff, domestic recruits are very hard to engage.

If we look back to the period before the care visa was introduced, waiting for care was endemic. Even the best providers could not attract and retain the staff that they needed. Without our international colleagues we could very quickly return to this situation.

There is no doubt that the skilled worker visa route was introduced in haste, without the appropriate discussions with the sector (both commissioners and providers), and it resulted in high levels of licence revocation and workers losing sponsorship through no fault of their own. There may be up to 40,000 visa holding care workers in this country who do not currently have a job in care.

It therefore made sense in April to discourage new international recruitment and focus on these ‘displaced workers’. But announcing that the visa is to be scrapped altogether without being certain that we can replace the skills that our international colleagues bring to the sector seems very short-sighted.

The most distressing aspect of the announcement was the description of social care as a low-skilled job – one which any of the millions of economically inactive could do if only providers wanted to engage with them. This is very far from the truth. The delivery of social care in a compassionate and strengths-based way is a highly skilled, although very low paid job. Describing jobs in the sector as low-skilled undermines our collected efforts to encourage young people to see care as a worthwhile career and not just a job that you do if you can’t do anything else, or didn’t work hard at school.

There are a number of responses to the new situation that providers and commissioners can develop together, but at the same time I think that we should lobby for a revised, better managed route to enable us to attract a fixed number of overseas recruits once the work with displaced workers is complete.

For employed international recruits there are a number of urgent actions to take:

• communicate to those working in the sector that they are valued and do not need to leave the UK immediately.

• confirm with Home Office exactly what the transition phase will involve, and how this will interact with the potential changes to the application for indefinite leave to remain timings – at the moment it seems that our current recruits may lose their visa status and have to leave which is causing anxiety to the staff and providers alike.

We also need to work as partnerships in regional hubs to identify the cohorts of people with visas but no job:

• those with practical barriers such as no UK driving licence are the easiest to upskill.

• some do not have the level of competence in spoken English to work in adult social care – this can be overcome in many cases.

• there are also those who did not actually have the skills or experience needed to join the care sector. For those with the values that make them potentially valuable additions to the workforce, upskilling has been achieved by many providers, and this could be extended through the regional work.

• some individuals are not suitable for work in social care – they do not have the right values or level of interest in the work. People in this category need to be identified as quickly as possible as they cannot be included in the future workforce numbers.

One of the key barriers to supporting displaced workers into new jobs is their gender. Male care workers are less attractive to care providers because it is assumed that they will not be acceptable to those who draw on care and support. This issue is not confined to international recruits, and it should be addressed urgently if we are not going to return to the days of a workforce crisis and unacceptable delays in receiving care.

We have been encouraged as providers to recruit more males into the sector, and we have done so, but it is much more difficult to deploy them. Individuals drawing on care and support and their families are often anxious about male care workers, and unfortunately this is often enabled by local authority social work teams.

We need urgent, open conversations about this issue, or we are potentially eliminating 50% of the population from our workforce as well as making the sector less attractive.

If we are to reduce our reliance on international recruits, we should work collaboratively to support domestic recruitment using some regional hubs as a model.

Social care is low-paid, and we cannot wait for the Fair Pay Agreement to solve this – it is too far away, too vague and it may or may not be funded.

However, it is a fantastic career with many opportunities for fulfilment, and it is our challenge to encourage young people to see it as a sector to aspire to, and more mature individuals to think of it as an opportunity to do something that truly makes a difference to society – possibly alongside another job, or immediately after retirement.

Career development and learning opportunities make careers more attractive for many, and the care sector is woefully lacking in these areas. Starting with the Workforce Strategy which we produced by all working together, we could develop practical, regionally focussed programmes to start to recruit and retain more effectively.

If we are to avoid a workforce crisis, we need to work together in a timely way irrespective of the political turmoil around us. Local care associations are ready, willing and able to partner with ADASS and the wider care sector on this.