Most liked posts in thread: New Immigration Rules

Not in my experience (31 years in social work). Most residential care staff are unqualified, on not much more than minimum wage. There are NVQ courses and such like available, which local authorities used to send their unqualified staff on. But most residential homes are outsourced to private companies these days, who won't put care quality ahead of profit margins.
Very few British workers will wipe old people's arses or deal with truculent teenagers for pittance wages. So the care sector is massively reliant on foreign workers, especially from Africa - many of whom have very poor English skills.
Unless the government is prepared to relax its rules there is going to be an almighty crisis in the personal care sector. And, no doubt, they'll expect the massively underfunded public sector to step in and bale out the private profiteers yet again, once the care homes start closing for lack of staff and the Winterbourne View type cruelty scandals recur. I wonder how many 'keep out the foreigners' types will be happy when their nearest and dearest are sitting in their own excrement for hours on end or unable to get home care services?

 

Time to train up some of the lazy workshy benefits cheats, believe me there's thousands of them. Give them some basic training and wage just above minimum wage and get the workshy scum working for their benefits.

 

RT 4 PM

 

They are, because British low skilled workers will not do that work for the money offered. Now they might have to. Something else is going to have to change to "encourage" British workers to take positions that they are currently not. My father died in a care home, those workers deserve £12 minimum an hour, is it a surprise so many horror stories of ill treatment in these homes are aired in the press?

 

I'm not one of these people who deride migrants coming to make a better life for themselves, I'd much rather have them than some of the indigenous workshy bastards I have the displeasure of meeting via my work. I'd include my in laws in that, the lazy benefit system fraudsters. Ashamed of my own sometimes.

 

Yeah hundreds of times. Yet the easy option is to bash the 'immigrant'. My in laws are a right case in point, both owe tens of thousands yet the authorities have struggled to get any of it back. Money that could have gone to recipients badly in need of it. To clarify, I'm not against benefits. My brother receives them after he went blind a couple of years ago. I'm against how they are implemented. I guess I've taken the thread off topic....

 

As opposed to all those 'fair and balanced' journalists writing right wing propaganda in the Mail, Express, Sun, Telegraph etc, you mean? All journalists have an angle; you choose to believe the right wing ones and I tend to the left, but that doesn't mean that everything written from the opposite viewpoint can be dismissed as false.

Regardless of her political standpoint (which is often much nearer LibDem than Labour) her description of the parlous state of social care is completely accurate. I worked in the sector for 32 years. Everything she describes I've seen many times with my own eyes. Privatisation of care services has been a total, unmitigated disaster. Wages, working conditions, care standards and capacity have all declined massively since the 1980s. When local authorities ran most care homes and home care services the staff training, care quality, work conditions and wages were much higher. Privatisation has been a race to the bottom. The sector is in meltdown and, given the ageing population, it's a ticking time bomb social crisis.

I challenge you to find anything in Toynbee's article that is factually incorrect.

 

Our resigning of Kai Brunker is in trouble now...

 

No work no benefits, you hear stories that within families not working has been their choice for two generations, how can anyone allow people to have a choice of working or not.

 

How long ago was that?
Was it purely council funded or did they have money to pay for it themselves?
Of course there are decent care/nursing homes around. But the more money you can afford to pay per week the better chance you have of getting one with decent training, staffing levels and care standards. But even that isn't guaranteed - my mother in law was privately funded and her care was pretty poor in my opinion.
For many ordinary people who can't afford to pay £800/£1000 pw for their care, they are reliant on the basic minimumum paid by cash strapped councils to private care homes, which buys minimum care from untrained staff on poverty wages.
This is the reality of the care sector today. I worked in social care for 32 years and saw the standards decline year on year. You can choose to kid yourself that I'm scaremongering if you like but, sadly, I'm not.

 

Youre pissing in the wind mate just forget it and look after yourself and your own.

 

Another thread to go on the ignore list.

 

Another poster that like labour swims against the tide of public opinion....

 

The question is if we are stopping people coming in for all these types of jobs who is going to do the jobs that will be left empty in places like care homes. More and more people are living in care homes where a lot of staff are immigrants.

 

Yet you were the first to reply!

 

So you've experienced it first hand, there was one at our club who was the same lived on Cantabury Estate didn't work but knew how to get every benefit going forward and used to take the piss about it, DJ on a weekend charging £180 per night for 5/6 hours work.