The head of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) has urged Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood to shield migrant care staff from plans to make it harder to settle in the UK
Shabana Mahmood is expected to set out reforms that will make it harder to settle in the UK(Image: Dan Kitwood/PA Wire)
Nursing staff don’t support the Home Secretary’s immigration reforms because they’re illogical and unfair.
Currently, migrant nursing staff in the UK can apply for permanent residency after working here for five years. But the Home Secretary wants to change this for those delivering care outside the NHS, including those already here, and make them wait 10 or even 15 years. This cannot be justified.
It is expected that she will announce her final version of the reforms in the coming weeks, but the current plans will be a disaster for the Prime Minister’s ambitions for a national care service. The Government has rightfully said nurses in the NHS will be exempt, the same must now happen for all migrant nursing staff, including those in social care.
The Prime Minister has said that reforming social care is one of the great moral challenges of our time and spoken movingly about the contribution of migrant staff. But his vision for a national care service can only succeed with a thriving nursing workforce to care for our sick and elderly.
The contribution of migrant nursing staff in social care can’t be overstated. Staff from overseas make up a third of all staff in social care. They’re holding understaffed services together, going above and beyond to ensure vulnerable people get the care they deserve.
But the social care workforce is also in crisis. Workforce shortages have made accessing care deeply unequal for older people and those with long term conditions. The crisis is also putting the NHS under enormous pressure, with thousands of patients stuck in hospitals who cannot leave because often there is nowhere in social care to discharge them to.
The Home Secretary’s reforms will only make this crisis worse and push thousands of staff already here out of the UK. They’re catastrophic for the Prime Minister’s plans for social care. We do need a plan to grow our domestic nursing workforce, but it’s illogical to attack the rights of those who are already here.
We have always relied upon migrant nursing staff coming from every corner of the globe to care for our sick, from the Windrush generation through to the pandemic.
In 2020, as Chief Nurse at King’s College Hospital, I worked alongside hundreds of migrant nursing staff who sacrificed so much to help the Covid-19 response. I know so many did the same in social care. That only a few years later a Labour government is set to betray those very same migrant nursing staff is deeply upsetting and the reforms are clearly unfair.
The Home Secretary is right that nurses in the NHS should be exempt from the changes, but it’s a clear double standard not to protect nursing staff in social care and the independent sector as well.
In Parliament on Monday, the Home Secretary said that the immigration system must be based on the ‘principles of fairness’.
Nothing is fair about telling migrants working in social care they will have to wait five years to secure residency when they first arrive in the UK, only to increase it to 10 or even 15 years when they’ve already been working here for years.
Changing the rules halfway through the game is the opposite of fairness.
Just as bad is that the Home Secretary may put more restrictions on migrant nursing staff claiming the benefits that they’re entitled to. They work hard, pay their taxes and play by the rules like everyone else. It means if they face hard times, they will be far more likely to go hungry or fail to pay the bills.
This will impact thousands of people and their families who have lived in our communities for years, they are our neighbours and our friends, and they deserve so much better.
We must do better than this. Our health and care services depend on its migrant workforce, and the UK should be a truly welcoming place.
Last month, in an exclusive with the Daily Mirror, we published our findings that showed that the UK already has the most hostile immigration system for migrant nursing staff among similar nations. Worse than our neighbours in Ireland and Germany, worse than Donald Trump ’s USA.
The Home Secretary should be looking to turn this around, instead of going further in the wrong direction. Migrant nursing staff in all parts of our health and care system need to be exempt from these reforms, or these reforms need to be abandoned.
