This week, Home Secretary James Cleverly has announced new measures to prevent care workers coming to the UK from bringing their family will come into force. The announcement has rightfully received criticism for being inhumane and counterproductive. It’s a case study in how little value is placed the lives of those who care in our political economy. Here we explore how we got here, and why we urgently need transformative change.

What is being proposed?

This week the government has confirmed that, from as soon as next month, care workers coming to the UK will not be able to bring their immediate family with them. This comes as part of a package of changes designed to reduce overall migration that also includes a doubling of the current income requirement to bring partners to the UK from £18,600 to £38,700.

Together, the policy not only reduces the relationships of those seeking to come to the UK to their financial worth, but in the case of care it creates hierarchies that will dictate the lives of those our society relies upon most.

Even on its own terms, the logic of the policy is mystifying. There are an estimated 152,000 vacancies in the domiciliary care workforce, and any ambition of filling them to meet the care needs of our population will require us to entice people from overseas. But this policy can only serve to do the opposite, disincentivising migration of the very workforce we so desperately need. 

For those of us who don’t subscribe to such a determination to strip down migration, the problem lies much deeper. Reduction of migration paired with such inhumane policies suggests that there is no value at all in families coming to the UK together. But, really there is a case to be made for social, economic and community benefit to creating a positive environment for families to move together rather than split across national borders.

This is something our systemic approach to care consistently underestimates. Too often care is seen as transactional; something that needs to be arranged or delivered, with little concern for the impact that has on people’s lives.

Saying the quiet bit out loud

At Care Full, we’re interested in what this represents for the standing of care in our political economy. Unsurprisingly, it isn’t particularly good news. 

The new policy says out loud the hierarchies that have been shaping our relationship with care over the long term. These hierarchies break down the interest political institutions have in the scale and quality of care according to who is being cared for and how. 

Firstly, on who is being cared for. Asking people to come to the UK to take on care work for UK citizens whilst creating physical barriers to caring for their own family, firmly implies the centrality of a colonial mindset to our modern political discourse. This exceptionalist rhetoric – emphasising the importance of British needs over our shared humanity – is straight out of the right-wing populist playbook. But there are real lives at play.

And, on how we care for others. This policy is an example of how we push unpaid care to the margins. How each family deals with the fall out is individualised, up to them. Unpaid care is implicitly considered to be our own responsibility. This is a pattern we see time and time again in how policies shape our relationship with unpaid care. From the burden of childcare costs to the challenges of a social security system that falls short of any meaningful financial assistance for carers.

Despite huge societal shifts in how we live and work, no significant attempt has been made to reshape how we care for each other, particularly outside social care systems. What remains is a consistent lack of engagement with unpaid care.

This new policy sets us on a path of denial that our relationship with care needs to change. Rather than understanding the value in care, our government is clearly stating it’s content to undervalue care work whilst relying upon the labour of those they have no interest in creating a home for.

A different world is possible

This policy represents a low point in our humanity around care, with the government pushing an agenda of us vs them. We have a long way to travel in order to transform the narrative around care. We must shift the system towards one which centres people and their relationships over some narrow concept of economic contribution. 

We need to be making the case that caring for others is a part of building a healthy and thriving community. More nuance is needed than arbitrary targets and thresholds which dictate our political decisions around migration and care. Yes, we need to campaign against this policy, but we also need to offer a new and more ambitious narrative showing that care and community can hand in hand.