An unworkable and costly immigration plan

On the face of it, the government’s immigration policy shows continued support for NHS recruitment, with a lowered salary threshold and, for now, nurses included in the occupation shortage list.

But the new policy does nothing to support social care, which is reliant on low-paid staff and is already struggling with huge funding constraints and increased demand (Fears for UK economy as Johnson closes border to unskilled workers, 19 February).

The impact of poor social care provision on the NHS is well known. Without these vital services, the most vulnerable end up without the care they need. This in turn adds pressure to overstretched A&E departments, and patients have to stay in hospital for longer than they need because there is nowhere for them to go. Demand for both sectors is rising. Projected growth of the population aged 75 and over highlights that by 2035 the number of social care jobs in England could rise by 800,000. This cannot be met by the UK labour market alone.

Moving to a points-based system that sets a minimum salary threshold above what a care worker earns, and not deeming the role as “skilled”, fails to recognise their value or the needs they meet every day in homes and communities up and down the country.

The government is failing to equip the social care sector to expand or even to retain its domestic workforce – the impact on patients, clients, carers and the NHS will be profound unless action is taken before 1 January 2021.

If this is to be the way forward, we need to see an exemption for care workers, who perform such a vital role, and the chancellor must invest in social care in the budget. Otherwise the government will be switching off the taps and expecting the supply of staff to keep flowing.
Niall Dickson
Chief executive, NHS Confederation

• My mother, who had dementia, was looked after in Sussex by nurses from Zimbabwe who were highly skilled in all sorts of ways, none of which would qualify them to stay in the UK under the proposed points system. They were fully trained by the agencies who employed them, and they were kind, compassionate, meticulous and reliable, 24 hours a day, as well as cooking the kind of food my mother liked and keeping her clean and groomed. All this on very low salaries. Experience shows that British nationals could not be recruited with these skills in sufficient numbers.
Dr Richard Turner
Beverley, East Riding of Yorkshire

• This immigration policy gives the appearance of one concocted by a keyboard warrior in a back room in Islington. A policy drafted without consultation with those sectors of the economy dependent on a number of unskilled workers appears foolish. Headline-catching it may be, and it will certainly appeal those core Tory voters who are opposed to immigration. But is it practical?

Apart from wreaking havoc on those industries dependent on unskilled immigrants, it will impose an additional burden on that most dysfunctional of ministries, the Home Office.

If they cannot manage the current immigration system, how will they deal with thousands more visa applications to the UK? Is the government really prepared to create the huge new bureaucratic machine to manage the new immigration scheme it proposes?

This government has yet to demonstrate that it can introduce and manage the universal credit system, so the possibility of it successfully introducing a new scheme to manage the movement of hundreds of thousands of workers seems unlikely.
Derrick Joad
Leeds

• In his analysis of the government’s new points-based system, Larry Elliott says that “workers from overseas will be welcomed provided they can clear the high bar set for them by the new immigration rules” (Taking back control is not the same as pulling up the drawbridge, 19 February). This is not how the system will work in reality.

My experience of recruiting highly qualified people from non-EU countries under the current system leads me to fear that the new system will be as off-putting as the current one is: all overseas applicants will have to join a queue, and processing applications will be so slow that those in the pipeline will be tempted to look elsewhere.

I am not at all confident that the government will put in place an efficient application-processing operation when implementing the new points-based immigration system. While the UK was a member of the EU, it was at least possible to recruit highly talented non-UK staff relatively straightforwardly from countries on our doorstep, and the UK benefited hugely as a result.

Now that those happy days are behind us, employers can expect bureaucratic inefficiency to cause recruitment delays in appointing all overseas talent, and this will in many cases mean that those recruited will not take up their posts because of the sheer frustration involved in waiting for a decision.
David Head
Peterborough

• While Labour are right to condemn the Tories’ actions on immigration, it was their shortsightedness that allowed the Brexit debate to take us down this dead end. They allowed our biased press to blame immigration and the EU for the problems of millions of British people, rather than pointing out that most of the discontent came from years of Tory austerity policies.

This allowed Boris Johnson and his rightwing supporters to take us to where we are now: Brexit, and an awful government creating an increasingly hostile environment to “outsiders”. I wonder who they will turn on when Brexit bites?
David Reed
London

• It’s nonsense to assert, as Maya Goodfellow does, that requiring language competency for immigrants is racist and xenophobic (There’s nothing ‘sensible’ about Priti Patel’s heartless immigration proposal, 19 February). Here in Canada, the ability to speak one of our official languages is a requirement universally accepted in this immigration-friendly country. The lack of such rules results in ghettoes and a disadvantaged underclass.
David Moores
Oakville, Ontario, Canada

• Priti Patel suggests the 8 million “economically inactive” people could enter the jobs market to make up for labour shortages. There was I busily consuming and paying tax in retirement, and all the time I was economically inactive. Who knew?
Martyn Taylor
Newark, Nottinghamshire

• As an economically inactive pensioner being treated for chronic lymphocytic leukaemia, I eagerly await my call-up letter from Priti Patel to work in the fields cutting broccoli, or perhaps in a strawberry farm in sunlit polytunnels.
Angela Boyd
Wellington, Somerset

• Are domestic marmalade makers considered to be economically active or inactive? (Letters, 20 February).
Stephen Thomas
Seaford, East Sussex

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