Euan Stainbank

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Lewell. I will confine my remarks to the impact of the ILR proposals on social care in my constituency in Scotland. Around 25% of social care workers come from other countries. We need social care staff who live, work and breathe care, and, with an ageing population, we need more of them. Most of those staff have diligently, and with a smile on their face, taken care of our families. None of them have received a good deal—or one that reflects their contributions—over the last few years, with inadequate pay offers often limited to the living wage. I held a roundtable in November on that subject with Falkirk’s care sector. I thank the fantastic local social care workers who travelled down to London to speak with me before Christmas. The concern they have is simple: employers typically only sponsor when they need to, and the recent rise in those coming on social care visas is due to the pay being unattractive to domestic-born workers. Every employer at my roundtable cited immovable difficulties in recruiting locally as the reason that they were pursuing sponsorship. That is unlikely to improve radically given the setting of successive paltry living wage levels at well shy of £15 an hour, well short of a sustainable wage for attracting domestic workers en masse reliably, and morally insufficient for anyone who contributes by working in such a valuable profession. This is a push without a pull. As MPs, we are hearing directly from providers—and workers—that a blunt transition to 10-year to 15-year ILR timescales for social workers before further work is done to recruit a sustainable workforce risks leaving one of the most important sectors in our country exposed in terms of recruiting critical workers.