World economy

Workforce

The end of free movement of labour will mean the UK can set its own migration policy. The Home Office’s Policy Statement lays out a single set of criteria to be applied to anybody wanting to work and live in the UK, whether from the European Economic Area (EEA) or beyond it.

For most graduate health care workers, the new system will be relatively permissive. Essentially any medical or nursing position in the NHS will

meet the requirements to recruit internationally. However, the likely slump in international migration during the pandemic means there may be a requirement to accelerate recruitment next year if this is possible, from the already stretching figure of 10,000 a year needed to address immediate shortages in 2019. The new system, unlike free movement of labour, will require considerable paperwork and fees stretching into thousands of pounds. Despite the huge wage differences between the UK and many countries that typically provide clinical migrant workers, there is a need for caution about this having a deterrent effect.

In social care, the effect may be more pronounced. The new policy document would entirely rule out migration in order to take up most frontline social care roles. Before the pandemic, the social care sector in England, where records are most readily available, had been adding several thousand EEA migrant workers a year. Without a growth in the share of EEA workers from 5% to 8% over the past six years, the rate of vacancies could have been significantly higher than the 8% seen last year.

Social care is likely to struggle to increase domestic recruitment because (particularly in England) it entered the crisis in a very poor financial condition, and the extra demands of the pandemic appear to have worsened this. Just 4% of directors of adult social services felt they had sufficient funding to meet statutory duties in a 2020 round of surveying, down from an already low 35% the year before. Hopes that unemployment due to the recession will make recruiting easier rest on the assumption that social care will fare relatively better than other sectors, such as retail and hospitality, but this seems very far from clear. Ongoing efforts to massively scale up testing and tracing capacity in the public and private sector will create a new source of competition for workers without a professional qualification interested in working within the health and care sector.

The sector also consists mostly of small businesses with less capacity to handle a complex and bureaucratic migration system: last year, most workers were in organisations employing fewer than 250 people.