The social care sector is facing its worst staffing shortage in living memory and things are only getting worse. But is the answer to cut the visa scheme that allows foreign workers to come in and look after our most vulnerable loved ones?
That's the view of the New Conservatives, a group featuring a number of Greater Manchester MPs who say their plan to stop issuing visas to care workers will help cut migration levels and mean homegrown workers should end up getting paid more.
Read more: 'Good chance' late night trams will return this autumn, Andy Burnham says
Speaking on The Northern Agenda podcast this week one member of the group, Bolton West MP Chris Green, said he believed the policy was worth pursuing for Rishi Sunak as the current 'very open' system wasn't working.
With net migration now at above 600,000, fellow Northern Tory Miriam Cates warned Rishi Sunak he faced defeat at the next general election unless emergency measures to curb net migration are introduced.
Listen to the full interview on The Northern Agenda podcast here:
And the Penistone and Stocksbridge MP said care home bosses should employ “local young people” instead of relying on foreign labour.
Her group, made up of Tory MPs from the 2017 and 2019 intake, said British employers had become “addicted” to cheap foreign labour as they argued it was time to “turn off the taps” of low-skilled workers arriving from abroad.
"You think at what point, when we're looking at business, whether it's care homes, whether it's the fruit pickers and farms, whatever it might be in British society, or British business, where we say we need more people coming in, at what point do you say, 'enough have come in to fill these vacancies'," said Mr Green, who was elected in 2015.
"And I would have thought with the many hundreds of thousands in recent years that have come in, in terms of net migration, we should have been able to fill those spaces, we haven't. So we therefore have to look at different solutions."
Nationwide there were 61,414 'Skilled Worker - Health and Care' visas granted in the year to September and the figure has risen every quarter since the scheme was introduced during the pandemic in 2020 to make it easier for employers to fill vital gaps.
In a Manchester Evening News piece last year homecare workers in Greater Manchester in 2022 described the ‘worst staffing shortage in living memory'.
And a Greater Manchester health and social care report said in 2021: "Unfortunately, there is huge concern and shortages across the workforce, with the combination of an ageing population and ageing workforce there is a need to increase the talent pipeline for the industry."
This week, in response to the report by the New Conservative group, Downing Street said the government has no plans to remove care workers from the shortage occupation list to cut immigration.
Asked whether care workers could be removed from the shortage occupation list, the official replied: “That’s not an approach we’re considering currently. Again, we know there is significant demand in the care sector for staff.”
For more politics news and analysis across Greater Manchester and the North subscribe to The Northern Agenda newsletter at www.thenorthernagenda.co.uk
But Mr Green said his group was not trying to cause problems for the Prime Minister but trying to move Conservative policy to being back in line with the party's 2019 manifesto promise of cutting net migration to below 226,000 people a year.
He said: "It's perfectly reasonable when he's still a relatively new Prime Minister, that there is this debate. And the question is, do we keep the relatively open system we have at the moment? Or do we look to moving it to actually what our manifesto commitment was?
"The official line from the government of the day always is whatever is the current government policy is always the right policy, is always the perfect policy until it changes.
"And one of the things we're doing is giving that space and actually articulating a concern right across the country. Because this is not a handful of Conservative MPs, representing a tiny minority position, this is quite a popular position across the country."
Other Northern members of the group include James Daly (Bury North), Nick Fletcher (Don Valley), James Grundy (Leigh), Mark Jenkinson (Workington) and Lia Nici (Great Grimsby).
