Next week a coalition of organisations representing care providers and workers, including Care England and the National Care Forum (NCF), is due to meet with MPs in Westminister to press their case for urgent review of the forthcoming changes to earned settlement, alongside Windrush campaigners.
They are adding their voices to the growing chorus of opposition to the changes, including the TUC general secretary Paul Nowak, who called the reforms that are set to impose much stricter conditions under which immigrants can apply for indefinite leave to remain (ILR) “fundamentally unfair”.
Meanwhile Care England chief executive Professor Martin Green said this week that the hope sparked by the Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s promise to “fix” social care is at risk of being “curdled” if they go ahead.
Connecting the reforms to the terrible treatment of members of the Windrush generation who were mistakenly targeted for removal from the UK by the Home Office is a powerful move and is sure to resonate with many Labour MPs, supporters and beyond.
Against a backdrop of increasingly vocal anti-immigration protests across parts of the country, the event is also an important demonstration of support for international care workers who supported vulnerable people throughout and beyond the Covid pandemic.
In the same way that the Royal National Lifeboats Institute (RNLI) has been forced this week to defend their volunteers who risk their lives to rescue people from drowning in British waters regardless of their country of origin, the care sector is speaking up for their workforce.
At the Westminster event next week, lead organiser charity The Work Rights Centre said that lived-experience speakers are set to highlight how the majority of the 2 million people likely to be affected by the Earned Settlement changes came to the UK at its hour of need during the COVID-19 pandemic, much like the Windrush generation answered the call for health and care workers at the birth of the NHS
The charity added that if the Burnham government upholds the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s proposals, the changes are “set to harm black and ethnic minorities and their families, by subjecting them to longer periods of work restrictions, exclusion from public funds, and higher visa fees”.
Those concerns deserve serious consideration. Beyond the statistics and policy language lie the experiences of individual workers who have already demonstrated their value to society.
Surely it is clear-cut that people who sat with our grandmothers and grandfathers, often in their final moments when families were prevented from being present, deserve certainty about their future. Asking them to wait ten to fifteen years before knowing whether they can build a permanent life in this country is difficult to justify.
And as if that moral imperative wasn’t enough, we still desperately need them as, according to the latest Skills for Health data, domestic recruitment is falling. Imposing this measure on care workers while exempting nurses feels inconsistent at the very least.
It’s interesting that the government has not published its response to the recent consultation on the proposals or its impact assessment, despite the measures being scheduled to come into force this autumn.
The Care Home Environment stands with the sector coalition in calling for these to be published urgently at the very least- and for the government to back the sector and its workforce as Mr Burnham has promised and think again about its next steps for reform.
