Tory plans to crack down on foreign health staff could prove the "final straw" for the care sector, a top union leader has warned.
Unison General Secretary Christina McAnea expressed alarm over Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick's push to cap NHS and social care visas, and ban foreign care workers from bringing dependents amid a furious Tory backlash over immigration. Estimates from the Office for National Statistics this week show UK net migration peaked at 745,000 in the year to December 2022.
Ms McAnea told the Mirror: "Employers, left with no choice but to recruit foreign workers, are horrified at the Government's latest attempt to appease its right-wingers. Care staff, many of whom have sold all they own to come here, will be terrified at having to choose between their children when it's time to renew their visas. This terrible policy could well prove the final straw for the care sector."
It comes as the Government's top immigration adviser warned the idea could be “very dangerous” for the social care sector. Prof Brian Bell, who chairs the Migration Advisory Committee, said the idea risked worsening the chronic staffing shortage in the sector - and could mean “lots of people won’t get care”.
"You can’t encourage enough British people to do the work in social care because it’s so badly paid," he told the Observer. "If you make it harder for migrants to come in on the route … that might begin to reduce the number who are coming in. But I think you have to ask the question, if you do it from the migration perspective, and you achieve that policy objective, aren’t you massively harming the social care sector?”
Meanwhile, Labour sought to outflank the Tories by saying it would increase salary requirements for workers coming from overseas. Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper vowed to change current rules that allow employers to pay migrant workers 20% less than the annual salary threshold of £26,200 for roles on the shortage occupation list.
Darren Jones, Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, said Labour would bring net migration down to a "normal level" of a "couple of hundred thousand a year".
It comes as a Cabinet minister has played down any suggestions of a split between Rishi Sunak and Home Secretary James Cleverly over the Rwanda deportation plan.
Mr Cleverly said the plan to ship people who arrive illegally in Britain to the African country was not the "be all and end all". However Mr Sunak stressed the importance of the scheme, which was ruled unlawful by the Supreme Court earlier this month.
Chief Secretary to the Treasury Laura Trott insisted they were on the same page. She told Sky News: "They're both actually saying the same thing, which is that Rwanda is part of our plan. Both saying it is part of the plan, it is not all of the plan."