An urgent plea from our CEO to Andy Burnham: don’t turn your back on migrant carers

In a heartfelt speech delivered shortly upon taking office, Andy Burnham pledged to change the UK’s social care system for good. For too long, he argued, politicians have shamefully dodged the difficult task of reforming adult social care. And for too long care users, their families, and the workforce have suffered in silence.

As someone who runs an organisation that supports care workers to access basic employment rights every day, I agree: care workers “should be the best paid people in society, not the worst”. His pledges to institute a national care service, a fair pay agreement, and a ministerial group tasked to improve work conditions are laudable.

But there is a glaring omission in Burnham’s policy. A whole third of direct care roles in the UK today are delivered by migrant workers. Workers recruited from low and middle-income countries in Africa and South-East Asia propped up the UK care sector after Covid and Brexit depleted the workforce. They saved the system from collapse. 

They came on haphazardly designed, highly-restrictive visas that tied them to their employers for years, without any access to public funds and, from April 2024, without even the right to bring their own children or partners to the UK.

As our team has shown time and again, too many suffered labour and financial exploitation at the hands of employers who, ironically, had been entrusted by the Home Office to recruit them. Today, thanks to Shabana Mahmood's "earned” settlement proposals, they face 15 years before they acquire the same rights as other workers in the UK.

Save for a brief thank you for caring for his father, Andy Burnham had nothing to say to migrant care workers. There was no indication that he plans to challenge the broken immigration system that led to their exploitation, and no indication of departing from Mahmood's controversial “earned” Settlement plans - even though 70 Labour parliamentarians and members of his cabinet have labelled them "un-British".

Is Burnham throwing migrant workers to the dogs to appease Reform-sympathising voters? That might buy him some time with sections of the media, which he was so obviously at pains to appease during his speech. But it won't fix the social care sector. 

One in three direct care workers today is a migrant. Thanks to Mahmood, this government is telling them to wait 15 years before they can change jobs, get sick, and survive on the same terms as their British counterparts. At some point, people will sense the betrayal. If they leave, as many of them said they will, by the time Burnham has his blueprint for a National Care Service, the system may be on its knees.

Migrant care workers need more from their Prime Minister than an empathic thank you in a speech from the heart. They need to know, as he said, that he is “not taking them for granted”. To show that, he needs to drop the “earned” settlement proposals, and rethink the rotten visa legacy he inherited.