Why Sir Keir Starmer is wrong to go after overseas care workers - Jayne Dowle

Care experts are incandescent, and rightly so. Closing this source of staffing, already dwindling due to recent restrictions on bringing over dependents, will not help deliver the care millions of elderly and disabled people need, either residential or in their own homes. It will simply make matters worse.

“The sector has been propping itself up with dwindling resources, rising costs, and mounting vacancies,” Professor Martin Green of Care England, which describes itself as the largest representative body for independent care providers, told the BBC.

“Taking [international recruitment] away now with no warning, no funding, and no alternative, is not just short-sighted - it's cruel,” he added.

But this is only half the story. What Starmer, in his metropolitan middle-class bubble fails to realise is that in communities like mine, Barnsley in South Yorkshire, care work provides vital employment opportunities for white, working class women (and men).

There. I’ve said it. And doing so certainly doesn’t make me racist or xenophobic, I’m simply stating a fact that seems to entirely pass the Prime Minister by, and any number of other prominent politicians too as soon as they start debating the ‘care’ issue.

About 1.7 million people work in care across the UK, according to Skills for Care, the official body that monitors the workforce. Again, according to Skills for Care figures, about 11,000 people from overseas took up posts in English independent care providers in each quarter of 2024-25, down from 26,000 per quarter the previous year.

By my rough maths, that’s a lot of people working in care who have not recently been recruited abroad. Of course, that 1.7 million figure will include people who emigrated here before visas for care work were instigated, or who were born in the UK and come from ethnically diverse backgrounds.

The point is, by obsessing over care workers coming here to work – let’s not forget, to work - on visas, the Prime Minister rides roughshod over the rest of the workforce.

Through family, I’ve had close experience of care provision here in South Yorkshire, and in Kent and Surrey too, so I understand that it absolutely stands to reason that most care home staff will be recruited locally, and any workforce will strongly reflect the surrounding community. So, for instance, the staff of a care home in a big city will be different from that of a care home in a rural village.

These nuances appear to be totally lost on Starmer. By obsessing over visas, he’s actually ignoring the significant concerns of the vast majority of the workforce, such as pay (rarely above the minimum wage) and conditions (contracts which deliver sick pay and holidays can be shaky).

In the local care home where my mother lives, most of the staff are white, working class women with family responsibilities who might struggle to find a suitable job in any other sector, such as retail.

I know quite a lot of them from our days as mums at the school gates, and speak to them as friends. Working in care, arduous and emotionally-demanding as it is, means long shifts – 12 or 13 hours is the norm – but three long shifts a week are easier to manage when you’re raising children and grandchildren than 40 hours a week spread over five days in a supermarket, for example.

Quite a lot of the women of my age are also caring for their own elderly parents too, but I don’t suppose Starmer and his Westminster circle ever stop to consider that.

As Barnsley council leader Sir Stephen Houghton wrote in this paper on Tuesday, families in towns like ours are disenchanted with the Labour government and won’t hesitate to switch long-held allegiance to vote for Reform UK in any election.

What I also see are young women, some of whom went to school with my own kids, working here, because it’s a regular job. My son, who’s 22, worked in care himself for almost a year, looking after severely disabled adults. I haven’t heard Starmer say a single word about the youngsters who are leaving school or college and going into care work.

His government should be investing in this demographic as the future, focussing on opportunities for training and development. We can only hope that Louise Casey, in her independent review of social care, considers this as a key point to explore.