Immigration scheme ‘must prioritise care staff’
CARE workers must be prioritised if a points system for immigration is introduced following Brexit and a care credit scheme should be introduced in the Autumn Statement, according to Adam Pike, a former policy adviser at the Cabinet Office and the Treasury.
Pike, whose SuperCarers website matches clients with carers and has just raised £500,000 in two days on crowdfunding website Seedrs, said: ‘We’re leaving the EU and everyone is obsessing about tariffs. But the most important bit is around migration and workers’ rights. We should be talking about the effect on the workforce. How do we make the best of the situation?
‘Four things are important. First, with a points system we need to prioritise the migration of skilled carers and nurses.
‘Two, we should be opening doors to foreign students who want to train in nursing and social care and we should be paying them to stay. Our population is ageing and we desperately need them.
‘Three, we need to train a massive cadre of new carers, because there are workers in industries that are suffering now and they have skills that are applicable to care. If we paid the profession better, and treat it as a profession, we can attract lots of people.
‘Finally, most local authorities only spend money on critical care, which means you’ve got to be near to death to get any support. To cut the spend on critical conditions you need to invest more in prevention. Government is incapable of thinking beyond three-year political cycles. We need to think about long cycles where spending today on prevention will be felt in 20 years.’
He said of a care credits scheme: ‘We should be introducing an elderly care voucher. Because one of the biggest travesties is that women leave the workforce to care for children, return and then leave again to look after a parent. It’s just not right.’
Pike said that by 2025 Britain would have a shortage of 600,000 carers.