Want to understand what’s really going on in Britain, and how we can fix it?
Join Vicky Spratt’s subscriber-only newsletter, The State We’re In, where she breaks down the big issues shaping the country. You can sign up to get it sent straight to your inbox, every single week, here.
A notable trend has started happening around migration statistics in Britain since Labour came to power in 2024. No sooner did Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announce her intention to change immigration rules to make it harder for migrant workers, such as care workers, to apply for settlement in Britain than the care sector started to struggle to fill vacancies.
These events are connected, but not in the way you might think.
Coming up in this week’s newsletter:
Why Britain’s new “migration crisis” may be a shortage of certain workers The challenge in some industries, such as care and construction, is attracting and training the next generation of workers How a planning application in Peckham, south London, has caused national controversyYou wouldn’t believe it if you read bombastic headlines about Britain’s “migration crisis”, but the problem we may now face is, as Alan Manning, professor of economics at the London School of Economics, puts it: “Our population will start declining in the next few years, because the number of deaths is going to be bigger than births.”
According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), Britain’s population is set to grow more slowly than previously expected over the next decade, with fewer migrants projected to move to the country and deaths starting to outnumber births as early as this year.
By 2034, the number of people living in the UK is projected to rise to 71 million, that is an increase of 1.7 million (2.5 per cent) from 2024.
However, it is lower than last year’s estimate of 72.2 million and reflects revised assumptions for lower migration amid tightened immigration controls by the UK government, as well as the falling birth rate that Manning mentions (which I have written about here, here and here).
The care sector is an example of how this problem might play out and cause issues in Britain’s labour market.
In 2024, partly as a direct result of visa changes announced in 2023 by the Conservatives, which were explicitly aimed at reducing migration and overseas recruitment of care sector workers, the care sector began to sound the alarm about high vacancy rates.
Skills for Care, the workforce development and planning body for adult social care in England, estimated that an average of 8.3 per cent of social care roles were unfilled in the year 2023-24, equivalent to approximately 131,000 vacancies.
Today, with more changes to visa sponsorship and indefinite leave to remain (ILR) coming, the problem with recruitment in the social care sector continues.
Professor Martin Green OBE is the chief executive of Care England, the largest representative body for independent social care services in the UK.
He told me that successive governments had not properly thought through how immigration policy changes would affect the recruitment of “senior care workers” for adult social care.
“There’s also another dynamic at play here,” Green warned. “People who are already here, who are now trying to renew their visas, are being rejected and not told why.”
“The Home Office is the most shambolic organisation you could possibly come across,” Green added. “Employers are not getting any feedback when these rejections happen. They are finding that care workers who have made a good contribution and who they’d like to keep are unable to continue working because of the ineptitude of the Home Office.
“All the while, there is also the issue of not being able to bring in new staff.”
Green is hopeful that a new care skills workforce strategy may help in the years ahead, but is cautious that there is a gap between the Government’s rhetoric on immigration and the reality.
Other industries, such as construction, agriculture and hospitality, face similar issues.
For a long time, training new workers in Britain has been a problem, but, as Manning notes, low pay and poor working conditions in care and hospitality in particular have also made it difficult to recruit.
Migration, which is currently falling and expected to continue to do so, has become one of the most contentious issues in Britain today. New data will be published later this week, which is expected to show that net migration has fallen to its lowest level since the pandemic. And while figures may rise slightly again, this downward trend has opened up a new area of debate about migration levels: do we have enough people coming to Britain?
It comes after years of hand-wringing and arguing, on both Britain’s political left and right, since Brexit, about what sort of people should be allowed to come to Britain for work, and where they should be allowed to come from (I covered this recently in another newsletter).
Polling by Ipsos has consistently shown that a large proportion (around two thirds) of the British public thinks that the number of people coming to the UK is too high. As the pollsters note, concerns are particularly great over asylum numbers, with poor border control and welfare benefits seen as the main drivers of what the public perceives to be “excessive immigration”.
There are undeniable problems with the UK’s immigration system and the economic pressures caused by certain types of migrant workers (more on that here). However, there are now also issues with a shortfall of workers in certain sectors.
Manning warns that whenever there is a shortage of workers in a sector, such as care, we must ask why it exists.
“There are usually two reasons,” he explains. “The first is that there aren’t enough people who are in the country who can do a job, usually called a skills shortage. It takes time to train people, which means short-term shortages may be resolved with migration.”
However, he says, “the other reason that you get reported shortages is that there aren’t people who enough people who want to do the job, and the reason for that is basically always poor pay and conditions that these sectors are just not paying enough to compete for workers in the labour market”.
This, Manning notes, is particularly the problem with social care, which, he argues, should be “more professionalised”.
Internationally, Manning points out to other countries, such as Canada (which has paused new visas for care workers), where care workers have left because they are not granted settled status, and warns that low-paid work may not be attractive in its own right, which is where Britain has faced another issue because low-paid migrant workers who stay can become “expensive” in the long run if they are entitled to or need to claim welfare.
Manning warns that sometimes a government will be “caught short” with vacancies in a particular sector. Migration, as we’ve seen in Britain, can be what he calls a “short-term fix” which “pushes the problem down the road”.
The construction industry is currently undergoing a recruitment drive with new skills hubs across the country, and, because pay is better (£50,000 on average for a bricklayer according to the National House Building Council), they won’t struggle as much to attract young people who may now be questioning going to university.
Getting immigration policy right, particularly in a febrile political environment, is no mean feat. Significant and regular changes to policy are bad – they cause uncertainty for migrants, employers and the economy.
Politicians must walk a tightrope, planning policy properly and being careful to listen to public opinion without listening so much that it means they make the wrong decisions.
“Ideally, you want a Goldilocks strategy,” Manning says. “Neither too hot nor too cold, just right in the middle.”
The problem, he concludes, is that any conversation about migration now involves asylum and small boats, even though these are arguably separate problems where it is much harder for the government to exercise any control.
I’ve recently spent some time looking at training in the care sector and interviewed school leavers who are working as care apprentices. I will devote an entire newsletter to their stories and how care work may look in the future in Britain very soon.
Do you have an immigration story? Are you a business owner who is struggling to find workers? I’d love to hear it – [email protected]
Housing crisis watch
A housing development in Peckham, in the London Borough of Southwark, has been rejected by the planning inspector, sparking outrage.
Berkeley Homes had hoped to build 867 homes, including 77 affordable ones, on the site of the Aylesham Centre – a shopping centre which includes a massive car park.
Berkeley took their application directly to the planning inspectorate which has rejected it on the basis that it would cause harm to the area.
Berkeley says that they are responding to the Government’s target of building 1.5 million homes by 2029. However, Southwark Council say that the homes they had proposed to build would not be affordable for many local residents based on average local wages. The planning inspector has also warned that the enormous impact of so many new homes on local infrastructure would be great and had not properly been addressed.
Controversy has now erupted. This case is a microcosm of the problems Housing Secretary Steve Reed faces. If the question is whether we need new housing, the answer is clearly, yes. But when we start to ask who can afford new homes, things get more complicated.
What I’ve been listening to….
As I wrote last week, I am presenting a brand new landmark series for The Rest is Politics called “The Gen Z Story”. It’s about the issues young adults aged 14-29 face today. The latest episode features an exclusive interview with former deputy prime minister and housing secretary Angela Rayner. Have a listen here.
Hence then, the article about how britain s new migration crisis will hit social care hardest was published today ( ) and is available on inews ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( How Britain’s new migration crisis will hit social care hardest )
Also on site :
- Clarivate Selected By Czech National Library of Technology to Develop Unified National Library Platform
- Jell-O Just Introduced a Modern New Dessert Line—and It’s Here To Stay
- Anita Rani Launching ‘Sisters Of Defiance’ Podcast With Guests Including Gisele Pelicot