15 May 2025

Responding to this week’s announcement from the UK Government on immigration, L’Arche CEO/National Leader John Casson said:

“The Home Secretary’s pledge to end care worker recruitment from abroad shows again the Government’s moral and policy blindspot on social care. This approach to the amazing people whose work enables our families and communities to live with disability, ageing and sickness is either callous or careless.

In L’Arche UK we support adults with learning disabilities. 25% of our care worker staff currently hold a Health care worker visa. They make us a society not of strangers but of friends.  They bring much-needed skills and compassion, empathy and kindness to our Communities.  We rely on them to enable us to create wonderful places for people with learning disabilities to live, and to ensure that services are safe and compliant.

We, like many other care providers, rely on overseas care workers to help us plug the gaps in our understaffed sector, yet despite the 185,000 international recruits joining adult social care between 2021/22 and 2023/24, we are still living in a crisis of 130,000 care vacancies across the sector. Without international recruitment careworkers, providers of quality care like us will have no other option than to hand back contracts and potentially close services. 

The white paper on immigration comes on top of last year’s budget, which added nearly £1m new costs on our 600-employee organisation, just to pay the extra tax and get to National Living Wage.

The government needs to stop, listen and think before making any more careless and performative announcements like this.  I hope they will consult with the care sector, and with the people whose lives depend on us, to understand the measures and funding required to enable care providers to recruit the staff we need. If not, irrevocable harm will come to millions of people who depend on care to live safely and independently.”

For press enquiries contact Sam Davies: [email protected] or 07467 848 596.