Over to you, Shabana...
Dan Smith, Chief Executive Officer
Over to you, Shabana…
Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary, is generally seen as a forceful and unapologetic operator in the current government. She takes a more hawkish view on immigration (relative to some in the Labour Party) and it was suggested that she had been leant on by the PM with the watered-down immigration reforms announced earlier this week. A small but positive change from the consultation published in November 2025 relates to the care sector and now migrant care workers on at least £25,000 a year and already in the UK can settle after five years. The previous plan would have made them wait for as long as 15 years and would have applied retrospectively to those care workers who had come to the UK in recent years.
The overseas care recruitment route remains closed. The graph shows why: lower wage migrant workers don’t make a positive net fiscal contribution to the UK over their lives, particularly where workers have brought their family with them: a staggering 55% (315,000) of visas issued to workers on the Health and Care route between 2021 and 2023 were to dependants. The previous Conservative administration closed the dependant route in 2024 and the Labour government closed the route for overseas care workers altogether in July 2025 (bad for the care sector). All this is largely a reaction to the “Boriswave” where the UK saw net migration of 2.55 million from 2021-24. Overseas care workers alone rose fivefold from 20,000 in 2021/22 to 105,000 in 2023/24.
Immigration is a hot topic and while certain categories of immigrants do make a strong net fiscal contribution to the UK (see chart!), most British people don’t agree. A recent British Social Attitudes survey found in 2022 as many as 50% of us thought that migrants were good for Britain’s economy. This figure is now only 32%.
None of this is good news for the care sector, where recruiting trained domestic staff is challenging. In 2025/26, British nationals filled 67.5% of adult social care posts in England, with roughly a third of posts filled by non-British nationals. Inadequate pay, poor terms and conditions and limited career progression have largely driven low domestic recruitment and retention rates. The steps afoot should address this and attract domestic talent: the Adult Social Care Negotiating Body will be set up by the end of 2026 to negotiate the sector’s first Fair Pay Agreement and the Care Workforce Pathway will provide a route for the progression and recognition of specialist skills in the care sector. However, these measures will take time to be felt in domestic recruitment. In a sector characterised by high turnover, where will the staff come from in the meantime?
The revised reforms aren’t concerned with answering that question. As ever, government has a tricky course to navigate in triangulating the economic needs of the country, ensuring the social care sector is appropriately staffed and dealing with political pressure over immigration.
