But the government’s plan for an emergency “overseas hiring spree” for social care, as reported on Friday, is exactly the wrong response to a possible winter emergency. First, while people are least opposed to immigration for health and social care reasons, overseas recruitment will still add to the current surge in immigration – around 1 million work, study and family settlement visas have been issued in the past year – which are set to return immigration anxiety to pre-Brexit levels. If we return to net immigration of 300,000 a year, on top of this very visible stream of illegal channel crossings, it won’t be long before a UKIP-style party pops up again to add to the new Tory leader’s headaches. Second, we have a cultural need to improve the status of care in our society and not just end the recruitment crisis. For a variety of reasons, including limited bargaining power and the difficulty of measuring care work, it has always been difficult for caregivers to capture the full value of their work in society. The old solution was to prevent women from doing much else. Now that the restriction has been lifted, we were. Not all parts of the care economy are low paid and low status, think doctors and even, for that matter, nurses. But nursery school and social care are real Cinderellas. The ONS puts the social care workforce at over 1 million with estimated job vacancies of over 100,000 and annual staff turnover of over 30%. Many employees are paid the National Living Wage of £9.50 an hour and the introduction of the latter has had the perverse effect, for care, of reducing any premium the industry once enjoyed over the less stressful work of, say, a shop worker. The market cannot adjust to this shortfall by raising fees because it is limited by what the government distributes to local authorities and the private providers to whom they in turn entrust care. Almost everyone agrees that this system needs to be redesigned around a better-paid, more professional workforce. But opening up to a new wave of immigration – and almost all care jobs are already open to foreign hires – just perpetuates the low-wage status quo and, as the Migration Advisory Committee put it in April, is “very damaging” in the long run sector. Furthermore, it is hypocritical for the government to argue that British employers should be paying and training people better, rather than trying to get to the immigration tap and then doing just that themselves. Finally, even if we accept that the fresh start we need will not come in time for the winter crunch, there are other things that could be done to make work more attractive to British people. Why not suspend NI payments for industry workers? Or appeal to the idealism of care revealed by recent increases in applications for nursing degrees and design a special program to attract under-25s to the industry for at least two years, with a big discount on university fees or a similar allowance. Also, as Richard Reeves says in his new book Of Boys and Men, we are trying to solve the care recruitment crisis with only half the workforce. Just 15% of frontline care workers are men. Wouldn’t many directionless young men respond to a “your country needs you” call to work in the industry, especially if there was the future promise of proper pay and career advancement? David Goodhart works at the Policy Exchange think tank and is writing a book on the devaluation of care work
