March 13th 2024
Invalid immigration permits are robbing homecare providers of staff, employer says
Grosvenor Healthcare have said they are paying dozens of migrant workers to sit at home after the government tightened application rules for overseas care workers.
Since the Covid-19 pandemic, thousands of overseas workers – mostly from Africa – were welcomed into the UK to help fill vacant care staff roles. However, at the beginning of this year it was revealed via unpublished figures that migrant staff were being treated horrendously. It was found that at least 800 people working in care homes or people’s residences were charted as potential victims in 2023 with some workers reporting that they had been left to sleep in cold, damp conditions and only received a fraction of their pay.
The modern slavery allegations have since led to the government tightening the application of the rules for overseas workers to come to the UK and have made it harder for migrant care staff to renew their visas.
Part of the crackdown included ministers announcing in December 2023 that care workers would no longer be able to bring their partners or children over to the UK with them.
Although, these new rules have been implemented after the government issued 106,000 care worker visas in 2023 despite hundreds of companies having not been inspected by the Care Quality Commissions (CQC). In addition, 275 visas were issued to a care home that did not exist.
Darren Stapelberg, chief executive of Grosvenor Healthcare, told The Guardian, who were the first to report on this story: ‘It has gone from one extreme to the other.
‘It was very, very easy to sponsor people to come over, but the system has been abused, so now they are making it almost impossible to get new people in and staff who are already here can’t get renewals.’
Grosvenor Healthcare, the UK’s third largest domiciliary care provider, who is paying reduced wages to 30 Zimbabwean workers and faces having to do the same to 90 more in the coming months, have revealed that 11 of their workers have left the country.
This news comes as social care in the UK is potentially facing the worst staffing crisis they have ever had. According to figures from The Kings Fund, in 2022/23 the overall social care vacancy rate was 9.9%, which equates to 152,000 roles. This statistic is substantially higher than the overall UK vacancy rate of 3.4% over the same time period.
‘We are losing workers who have made a great contribution to this society, at a time when you could quadruple our workforce and still not have enough staff,’ Stapelberg said.
Image: C S Photography