Priti Patel’s immigration changes will push the care crisis over the edge

Editorial: When inside the EU, Britain’s mechanisms for dealing with shortages of skills were seamless. Now they are being replaced by a clunky and arbitrary bureaucratic system

The home secretary says the changes will ‘restore trust’ (AFP)

From what little that can be gleaned about the activities of Dominic Cummings, artificial intelligence, robotics and even cyber soldiers are attracting a good deal of interest at the heart of government.

There’s nothing wrong, necessarily, with such long-range ambitions for “global Britain”, but until the scientists and engineers come up with an automated social care worker, human beings will still be required to work in the care homes and help vulnerable people look after themselves in their own residencies. There are not enough of them.

That is a problem, given the strictures of the government’s new points-based immigration system, announced by Priti Patel yesterday. Despite there being already 100,000 vacancies, and a system plainly under strain, care workers are glaringly and unaccountably omitted from the list of skills apparently in demand. The flow of staffing that used to arrive from the European Union has already started to dry up, and there is no facility to replace them with workers from aboard.

The government’s case rests on the notion that care workers can be recruited and trained domestically, and that that is preferable to relying on the migration of workers from abroad. Ministers hope that migration will soon be unnecessary.

The demographics and sheer scale of the demands of the care sector are against this facile assumption. The number of younger people entering the labour market and willing to take on such work, even at higher wages, is too small. The post-coronavirus, post-Brexit army of the unemployed won’t yield that many workers in the right places who are suitable for retraining and redeployment.

Supply, then, is short, and demand, or at least need, is growing inexorably. As is well known, Britain has an ageing population. The nation is living longer but also spending more of that bonus of longevity alone and in sometimes failing health, requiring assistance in varying degrees. Such attention tends to be labour intensive.

Again, as is well accepted, the country has yet to come to terms with the financial implications of this. One major factor that will make it more difficult to fund social care is if the pressure of demand for care workers pushes wages, costs and fees ever higher.

Covid-19 both exacerbated and highlighted the unseen crisis in our care homes, long the Cinderella of the social services. The care crisis, in turn, reveals a more worrying fundamental weakness in the new points-based approach to immigration – it entirely ignores market forces. This is strange indeed for a party in a government supposedly devoted to the market economy and is a token of its drift from Thatcherism, which has the virtue of intellectual coherence, to populism, which contains saloon bar myths and wishful thinking at its core.

The normal mechanism for dealing with shortages of skills is to call forth an increase in the quantity and quality of labour through higher wages. Inside the EU, a vast range of skills and types of worker can and do move freely across borders, for the good of all concerned. Now this relatively seamless and elegant economic mechanism is being replaced by a crude, clunky arbitrary bureaucratic system of planned labour. Maybe in a fast-growing economy with obvious skills shortages such as Australia, there might be a case for it, but the way it is being transplanted to Britain seems clumsy.

The aim is said to be to attract “the brightest and the best”, which is fine; yet Britain also needs its unskilled and semi-skilled labour, such as good care workers with an uncommon combination of dedication and personal qualities. They deserve points too.