Priti Patel’s immigration changes will push the care crisis over the edge

Editorial: When inside the EU, Britain’s mechanisms for dealing with shortages of skills were seamless. Now they are being replaced by a clunky and arbitrary bureaucratic system

The home secretary says the changes will ‘restore trust’ (AFP)

From what little that can be gleaned about the activities of Dominic Cummings, artificial intelligence, robotics and even cyber soldiers are attracting a good deal of interest at the heart of government.

There’s nothing wrong, necessarily, with such long-range ambitions for “global Britain”, but until the scientists and engineers come up with an automated social care worker, human beings will still be required to work in the care homes and help vulnerable people look after themselves in their own residencies. There are not enough of them.

That is a problem, given the strictures of the government’s new points-based immigration system, announced by Priti Patel yesterday. Despite there being already 100,000 vacancies, and a system plainly under strain, care workers are glaringly and unaccountably omitted from the list of skills apparently in demand. The flow of staffing that used to arrive from the European Union has already started to dry up, and there is no facility to replace them with workers from aboard.