The CEO of the Homecare Association has warned that the UK could return to ambulance queues and a lack of beds following the government’s announcement on legal migration.
Speaking on GB News, Dr Jane Townson said:
“I think it’s important to say that people in the care sector would rather recruit locally. That’s always been the case in the past. The only reason that we ended up having to recruit internationally is because there was nobody coming forward for the jobs.
“Straight after the pandemic, the workforce members fell of a log and that then began having real serious impact on people in our communities who were not being able to get into hospital, having to queue outside in ambulances.
“People were dying because of that. So the government opened up the recruitment from abroad, but unfortunately, the Home Office at the time didn’t do a good job of organising it in a concerted fashion. They didn’t come and talk to us. They didn’t understand the sector.
“They issued sponsorship licenses to providers that weren’t registered with the Care Quality Commission, some people didn’t do care at all, and a lot of the problems have come from that incompetence at the beginning.
“I don’t know what we’re going to do, in all honesty, because they talk about fair pay agreement, they talk about training, but they’ve cut the budget for training. The Fair Pay agreement isn’t coming anytime soon, and the Treasury keeps telling us it’s no more money.
“I imagine that we’ll just end up back to that place where there isn’t enough care, and we’ll be back to ambulance queues again.
“It’s not cheap [foreign labour]; the wages for overseas labour are actually higher. The minimum wage for an overseas worker is £12.82 an hour, whereas for a British one, it’s £12.21 so that is a myth.
But if you look back in our history, we’ve had ten prime ministers over the last 40 something years: every single one of them has ducked the issue of our aging population.
“We are sleepwalking into a humanitarian and economic disaster, because in 20 years’ time, there’s going to be double the number of 85-year-olds as there are now. A quarter of us are going to be 65 and more. Who’s going to care for everybody?
“It affects all of us, not just older and disabled people, because younger people that become ill can’t get into hospital because all the beds are taken by people who are old and disabled because we’re not supporting them at home in the community.
“Harm is going to come to people of all ages, and we’re all in this together and we need to find a solution together.
“We’re hoping that Baroness Louise Casey will be able to knock some heads together and come up with something that’s more sensible for the longer term.”