“Potentially catastrophic” Farage plan to deport legal migrants would devastate Welsh care homes, warns social care champion

A social care champion says Reform UK’s “potentially catastrophic” plan to threaten legal immigrants with deportation would put vulnerable people at risk in Wales.

Mario Kreft MBE, the chair of Care Forum Wales, says it would be hugely damaging to care homes and home care companies who rely on overseas workers and put more pressure on the already beleaguered NHS.

According to Reform leader Nigel Farage, migrants should be forced to reapply for new visas and he pledged to abolish the main route towards permanent settlement in the UK.

The controversial idea has already attracted cross-party condemnation and Mr Kreft pointed out that the social care sector was “hugely dependent” on overseas workers.

The scale of the problem , he said, was emphasised by official statistics which showed that 15 per cent of registered care workers in Wales were born outside the UK.

Risks

Mr Kreft said: “These proposed new policies from Reform UK present significant risks to the adult social care sector here in Wales.

“The people who staff these vital institutions are highly skilled, giving us added value beyond helping us solve the problem of the fact that we have insufficient numbers of local people willing to work in the sector.

“What is being proposed here, stripping people of their Indefinite Leave to Remain status and moving them back onto visas, amounts to changing the rules of the game half way through.

“We’ve relied for many years on people from overseas to come and provide care, nurses and doctors in the NHS and in social care.

“Once you start talking about changing the rules, once you start making it less attractive or people feel less welcome, people will be feeling very anxious.

“There will be people who’ve worked for years in this country, all through Covid who’ve done fantastic work caring for people from Britain who now will be thinking, ‘am I really welcome here?’ Is this going to be the future that we’ve talked to the family about or even do we have to move to another country’.

“You cannot underestimate the anxiety and fear this has already caused and it’s making it even harder to recruit staff and we may very well lose a significant number of those we currently have as they seek opportunities in countries with more welcoming attitudes.”

“Madness”

He added: “Let’s be clear, this potentially catastrophic policy is focusing on reducing the numbers of people coming here who we need, who come here by legal means and contribute to the society and to the tax base.

“It’s curtailing necessary, legal immigration to deal with this issue of the small boats which is a totally separate thing. We need to call this what it is, a cynical conflation of totally distinct issues for headline grabbing, political point scoring.

“It’s a headline grabbing policy which will win votes but the implications of this would be serious in the short term but disastrous in the longer term.

“As a sector, we see more clearly than any other the needs that arise from having an ageing population.

“We are already suffering a major staffing crisis in Wales with more than 10,000 vacancies in social care.

“If we lose people that we cannot replace and that is highly likely from this misguided policy, then inevitably, great pressure will be put on the system.

“Care homes and domiciliary care companies would almost certainly curtail their services and some would even close down.

“There will be many countries who’d want to take these people. They’re highly skilled and quite honestly, they deserve far better than this.

“It would all fall back on the NHS and when the social care sector sneezes, the NHS catches a cold. This is madness.”