Media Storm - How Britain turned its back on care workers

Episode Date: September 3, 2026

Care about independent and ethical news? Support Media Storm on⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Patreon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠! Angry? Find out how to help at The Care Workers Charity ‘Get Involved’ page. Adult social care in England is one of the hardest, lowest-paid jobs in the country, holding up a system that governments of both main parties call "broken" – yet keep declining to fix. The average care worker is paid close to the legal minimum, and the sector's vacancy rate is three times the national average. Into that vacancy vacuum, the post-Brexit Tory government opened the Skilled Worker visa route. Arrivals surged. Care workers became the single biggest group on the visa, and the UK suddenly hit RECORD NET MIGRATION! Over 900,000 in 2023. The headlines went wild. That peak became a political weapon. The state's response was not to fix pay or funding in the care sector. It was to squeeze the very workforce it had just imported. Care workers lost the right to bring family over. Sponsor licenses were sweepingly revoked, and thousands of workers were left stranded, often laden with recruitment debt, given no recourse to public funds. The media ignored the human costs of the cull they cheered on. In this episode, Mathilda and Helena are joined by two carers - Clementina Odih Okozi and Georgia Edwards - to find out the real causes of the "crisis" in care. This episode is hosted and produced by Mathilda Mallinson (⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@mathildamall⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠) and Helena Wadia (⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@helenawadia⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠)  It was edited by⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠Christy Callaway-Gale⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ The music is by⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ @soundofsamfire⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow us⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠@mediastormpod⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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not just the rich and powerful. Helena, I want to ask you something nobody likes to think about. When you're old, like really old, the kind of old where you can't dress yourself or wipe your own bum, who is going to do those things for you? God, straight in with the existential dread. I mean, like, good morning to you too. No time of small talk. We'll be old before we know it.

Okay, well, to be honest, this is kind of tied up in my questions over whether or not to have children, right? Like, part of why it is helpful maybe to have children is because when you get old, hopefully they can look after you or, I don't know, send you to a nice care home. What would you answer? That is definitely the best reason to have children. Oh, I'm way too reckless and clumsy to live to old age, let's be honest. But if we were to judge by the current model in our country, you can probably assume the person looking after you will be some overworked, underpaid, lovely person that you've never met. Care workers work for close to minimum wage, doing one of the hardest jobs in the country.

And the way we treat them tells you almost everything about, the way we treat you at your most vulnerable. That is today's episode. Okay. Well, this feels like a very media storm story, underreported, misunderstood, and I'm guessing, quietly a bit racist. You are guessing correctly. Look, the care sector crisis, that's a term you'll all have heard. It's not uniquely British. This is what happens to every rich country with an aging population and below replacement birth rates. Yeah, I think people are by now familiar with the aging population conundrum, but maybe just break it down very quickly.

Okay, picture the country as a pyramid. Lots of working age people at the bottom, paying tax and doing the care work. Fewer older people at the top. Their pensions and care funds are comfortably covered by the working generation's taxes. For most of modern history, that shape has held. But now, flip it. People are living much longer and having far fewer children.

So the top of the pyramid swells and the bottom shrinks. Fewer workers to fund elderly care. More elderly people needing care. That's the dilemma. Exactly. Now, economists call it the old age dependency ratio. And it's climbing across the so-called developed world. Now, the World Health Organization projects a great.

global shortage of 10 million health workers by 2030. Pretty close. I mean, 10 million is not a shortage. It's a gaping void. Right. So every wealthy aging country is trying to fill that void from the same place, the global south. Germany planned the triple wind scheme to fill an estimated 150,000 nurse shortfall. At the other end of the equation, the Philippines has seen about half of its nurses emigrate. So aging democracies have been competing for the same finite pool of mostly global South care workers. And then presumably complaining about immigration. Never. Never do that. Right. Let's look at Britain. Adult social care has been underfunded here for decades. Every party in government calls it broken. Vacancies run about three times the national

average. Brexit, which saw a mass exodus of European workers from Britain, really compounded this problem. So then we turned to the rest of the world. Into that vacancy vacuum, the post-Brexit Conservative government opened the skilled worker visa in February 2022. Arrivals surged and care workers became the single biggest group on the whole skilled worker route. In fact, after student visas, health and care visas were the single main factor pushing net migration to a record high. This was the year ending June 2023, net migration surpassed 900,000. I remember the headlines. It was every front page. Like so much for taking back control, Brexit brought record migration. Yes, and it was so predictable. And here's the first

thing that the media got wrong. That number was reported as a scandal of border control, a failure to keep people out. When actually, it was a deliberate state policy to be. bring mostly health and care workers in. And why did the state need to do that in large part? Because it refused to pay British workers enough to do the job. So in a sense, the immigration crisis was manufactured to fix the care sector crisis. Exactly. But that is not the story we were told. We were just told too many people panic. So today, faced with this immigration back, backlash, Labor says it's taking a different approach and it's trying to fix care recruitment at home. This is certainly a worthwhile task, although many people argue we'll still need some immigration

due to the pace of the ageing population. But the problem is, so far the Labor government has done less to fix pay or funding in our care sector and more to squeeze the very workforce we just imported, as if that will solve the root problem. So once again, politicians are acting as if punishing migrants will fix broken public services rather than doing the, I imagine, difficult work required. Well, yeah, that's the danger. Last year's NHS 10-year health plan gave social care little direction. It effectively deferred that sector to the Casey Commission, whose final report isn't due until 2028. That's also when the first real pay rise is expected. Okay. So in the meantime, how has the government been squeezing the workforce it just important?

First, in March 24, the Conservatives banned care workers from bringing their families. No partners, no children. For a job, we begged them to come and do. Then in July 2025, Labor closed the overseas route for carers altogether and began rapidly revoking licenses from thousands of care recruiters. Also, they sold these measures as protecting workers. from exploitation. So they closed the door on care workers and then called it a favor to care workers.

Yes. And look, it's true. Many care worker companies were and are extremely exploitative and should have had their licenses revoked. But the government brought in this measure without publishing an impact assessment, which may be why the impact has been so terrible. The ban, combined with the rapid license revocations, has left tens of thousands. of care workers already in the UK, either tied to their employers or stranded in debt and scrambling

to find a new employer to sponsor them, all the while prone to potentially even greater exploitation. Yes, I've heard about this because actually the idea for this episode stemmed from my mum, who is a volunteer debt coach with the charity Christians Against Poverty. And my mom says she is increasingly coming across people who are on these carework visas, who through no fault of their own are being left penniless. So why does this happen? Why are so many foreign care workers in crippling debt? Basically, care visas have to be sponsored.

So that means that they're linked to one specific employer. Lose the job and the countdown begins. You get roughly 60 days to find another licensed sponsor or you have to leave. This is one reason that exploitation is so common. You can't just leave a bad boss because your right to be in the country is attached to their sponsorship.

But the financial jeopardy may be even greater than the risk of deportation. Because during those 60 days, care workers face something called no recourse to public funds. That means no benefits. Even though they've been cut off

from near minimum wage, they can get no support at all. And to make matters worse, they may face thousands in outstanding recruitment debt. Okay, explain that. Well, basically, once the wealthy world started begging for global self-care workers, bad actors started developing exploitative schemes to monetise it. Many recruiters charge care workers' extortionate hidden recruitment fees or processing charges, essentially locking them in debt bonded.

These are generally illegal, but very widespread. Workers have reported being held to £10,000 in recruitment debt. So let me get this straight. You come here legally to do essential work. You go into debt to do it. You're banned from bringing your spouse and your kids. You're tied to one employer. And if the government decides to remove your employer's license to protect you from exploitation,

you have 60 days and no benefits before you are removed from the country, probably still in mountains of debt. And then you add to that the hostile attitude to immigration. So we said, please leave your home to care for us. And then they did, and now they're told, go back home. And Brits benefiting from the care work think they're the ones being ripped off by this migration scheme. Yep, that is the deal. And worse, the deal can keep changing.

Last year, Labor announced radical change. to settlement pathways, they doubled the standard qualifying period from five years to 10 years, and care workers, dubbed lower skilled, were given a 15-year baseline to get settled status. These changes apply retrospectively to people who came under the old five-year promise, people who've already invested years of their life and now have to compete every year for fewer and fewer sponsors due to the government call. So these plans haven't quite been finalised. They were announced in a white paper and we're expecting to hear the final settlement plans this autumn. Honestly, it's just cruel. It's just cruel. It is. And before I go on, I want us to take a quick look at how this gets reported.

Because there was a perfect little media storm on exactly this just last month. And it tells you everything about the media's role. Go on. So in July, the Times ran a story. 12 care workers from Cameroon. brought 180 family members into the country between them. Sorry, 12 people bought 180 dependents. That seems like a lot. That would be a 15 to 1 ratio, so yeah, a lot. The problem was, it wasn't true.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism looked into the numbers. Turns out the 180 family members actually related to 1,800 Cameroonian workers who had arrived years earlier, not the 12 who came in the year to 2026. And far from the 15 to 1 ratio, the Times reported, home office figures showed those 1,800 workers each brought with them fewer than two dependents on average. What? So where did the 15 to 1 come from? Well, that is a great question, Helena. The Times had been handed this figure from nowhere other than

conservative party research. Then after the Times published it, the parties, Shadow Home Secretary Chris Phelp put the false figure in a social media video that got over 100,000 views. Reform UK obviously went on a rampage. GB News ran a matching article. When the truth came out, they quietly deleted it with no correction or apology. The Times corrected theirs three weeks later. Their correction went on page 22. Of course it was on page 22. Yeah. So I want to quote this economist speaking to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Jonathan Port, he called this coverage, clickbait racist bullshit. He also said the fact that the shadow home secretary should use transparently absurd statistics

to promote his xenophobic and economically illiterate policy shows that he is either a liar or grossly incompetent at his job. Sadly, I bet way more people heard Chris Philp's inaccurate comments than this economist's hilarious ones. But this is how it works. A political party or political think tank manufactures a. scary number, scary ratio. An aligned newspaper launderes it into respectable news. Social media supercharges it. By the time anyone checks, it's too late to change people's minds. Listeners, be careful what you read. This is why we just bang on and on about media literacy.

Right, because there are real consequences to the media's failures, whether that's a failure to represent lived experience, see people behind statistics, or fight the urge to fearmonger rather than understand. It takes us down policy roads that don't remotely match what we need. And underneath all of this runs something deeper. Attitudes are attitudes towards old people, for one, about anyone really who is past what our economy counts as productive. And also our attitudes towards the people doing the caring. We pay them minimum wage. We class them as lower skilled. Many are migrants who society basically treats as human capital units of labour to be switched on when we need them and switched off when the politics returns. And both of those, when you say them out loud,

sound like the same idea that a human being is only worth what they can produce. Which is a very capitalist way of seeing a person. We've built a culture that struggles to value anyone outside the market, the very old, the very sick and the people who tend to them. It's like in the US, ice raids are suddenly causing a labour crisis in the care sector. Shock horror, they didn't see it coming. Exactly. And it also shows the distance between how politicians sell immigration policies and how they affect people in real life. The raids were sold to people as pure border control, right? Crime reduction.

But guess what? Immigrants are a huge share of the people who staff the US care sector. So now the same communities that cheered on ice find they can't get care for their elderly. We deport the people we depend on and then act surprise when there's no one left to do the work. Today we'll ask, why is a sector that everyone agrees is broken, still broken? How did we import a whole workforce to rescue it and then set about punishing them for coming? And when the doors are shut and the carers are gone, who's going to care for you.

Immigration figures have just landed. Are you ready? Migrant workers are still bringing in family members. Lots of care workers came to this country because they were asked to. And they have been there for us. How many people are going to wait for 15 years? We call on this home office to listen to our crime. We're out of care.

Welcome to Media Storm, the news podcast that starts with the people who are normally asked last. I'm Matilda Malinson. I'm Helena Wadia. This week's Media Storm, Careworkers, how Britain begged for them, then turned on them. Welcome to Media Storm. Our first guest knows this system from the inside. She came to the UK to work in adult social care, one of the hardest and most essential jobs there is, caring for people at their most vulnerable. She's also a member of the Careworker Advisory Board and the Careworker Champions Project, helping ensure care worker voices are properly represented. We're so grateful she's here to tell us about it all. A very warm welcome to Media Storm, Clementina Oddy Ocozy.

Thank you for having me. Our second guest has also spent years in care work here in Britain and in a range of different capacities, both as an unpaid carer to her own mother and other loved ones and a freelance carer working alongside her career as an estate agent. Thank you for joining us very early in the morning, Georgia Edwards. I'm happy to be here. Georgia, could you start just by talking us through? What a day of care work actually involves? What does it ask of you? Well, I tend to do living in residential care if I'm working. So it can be anything from taking up a cup of tea to somebody in bed, going to walk the dog, if it's personal care, as they call it, helping them get dressed, have a shower, have a bath.

or it could be filling out a death reform. If everyone gets up in the morning and thinks, or what am I going to do today? Most people don't really know, do they? But you're the unseen, you're the helper, you're the carer. So you've got to slot in to whatever is in that person's mind. Sometimes even before they've even thought about it. You're an administrator, you're an office manager,

you're a, I say I'm chief cook and bottle washer at Waiting for God. Wow. Okay. Is that, Clementina, is this sort of what you expected when you decided to come to the UK and do this work? What did you think the job would look like? What did you think the deal around it would be? And how did that compare with what you found? I came here expecting that I'm coming to use my skilled to work in an industry where I will be appreciated and value. But that was not the case. So coming to a society where you have to work long hours, you're constantly born out, and your pay you're getting does not evaluate the tax that you're doing. So at the end of the day, after paying your bills, you're practically left with nothing. Right. And we're constantly told the care sector is in crisis. But I suppose a question for both of you is, from the inside.

why do you think the sector is in crisis, Georgia? Because crisis sells podcasts and papers. The people that are making the decisions need to look at what an average day of a care worker would be looked like. And look at £11.75 or £12.75 or whatever, you know, this minimum is. And go, well, would you do it? Why, you know, would you do it? Tesco's pays better. pays better. And yet you want your nearest and dearest to be looked after. And it's that everybody

above the carer is getting paid far too much. And there isn't enough left for the carer at the end of the day. Can I just ask, as a follow-up, do you feel those issues that you've identified as being the root of the problem? Are those the issues being reported in the media? Do you see that being properly covered? No. No. I mean, you'll pick up a daily fail and it will be, you know, some awful care home that's been investigated. It's not, you know, this one thing. Look at, you know, our misty-eyed prime minister talking about his father.

Nobody thinks about care until it affects them. And then it's a crisis. Absolutely. Sorry, I'm very on my soapbox about it. No, we love it. And Clementina, the same questions for you. From the inside, why do you think the sector is in crisis? And do you think that what you're,

think is the problem is identified or represented in the media? So I would actually say that the media, the papers, yes, there is a crisis, but they are not focused on what the problem is. Their attention is on immigration and exploitation and all that. But the main ball of contention, why the sector is in crisis, is carers are not getting FEPA, they are not focused on fixing the problem. And again, these policy makers tend to pass rules, make rules, because they don't have a first-hand experience of what carers really go through. People who have had first-hand experience truly understand what it means for carers to be in the sector to do their job. So I think they are really not focused on the problem. There's just too much

distraction. Okay, so let's focus on the problems that you have identified, pay and conditions. When it comes to pay care works, it's close to the legal minimum wage. The government's new settlement plans formally class it as lower skilled work. Georgia, you've done this job for years. Does the low pay and ranking reflect the skill and responsibility of what you actually do? No, absolutely not. You know, a dog walker earns more than I do. A cleaner burns more than I do. Mr. Smith has a stroke. And then all of a sudden they've got to have carers and they've got to pay them.

They don't appreciate that that care worker has probably got 15 minutes to come in, make them a cup of tea, get them dressed, make sure they've had breakfast, take their medication. And then they've got to be on to another Mr. Smith who could be five miles away. and you're not going to get paid to go there. So, I mean, I honestly think if the policymakers actually sat down and did the maths, why would you go into work into care? If I wouldn't work for an agency, I just refuse. But migrant care workers don't have that luxury.

They have to be registered with an agency. I go to homes. You're driving between calls. You get there. You're working independently. making a fair judgment to judge correctly what is actually best for the patient before if you need help whatsoever. If there's any emergency, there could be instance where you have to perform CPR or

cartital care. Those are existential skills. Not just anybody can do that. And it takes someone who is passionate to be able to give care to another person. person. So I think it's a big skill. It shouldn't be low paid at all. If we're asking why this work gets the low skill label, something that comes to my mind is that care work is very female dominated. It's also very racialized. It's a minority dominated workforce, women, people of color. And I feel like historically, work done by women and work done by people

of colour has been coded as unskilled, right? I think the reason why you have women dominating the industry because women have caring nature. Women, they tend to not show. It's just something that is inbuilt. You see a woman is good with children. They're good. We're looking after people.

It's just something of nature. We're talking about women. Nature, maybe, but certainly by nurture in terms of society. has historically expected women to be in charge of the home and look after the home and do all the caring, care for the kids and care for the in-laws. However, now they also expect women to go to work and be an equal breadwinner, yet they refuse to value women both the work they do in a traditional workforce and especially the work they do at home. And we see that in a

number of ways. We see that through a lack of maternity leave pay. We see that through the gender pay gap. So, yes, historically, work done by women has always been coded as less important or unskilled. So to carry on talking about fair or unfair pay, there is a fair pay agreement coming. Announced last month it opens a formal process to improve care worker pay. But, Negotiations don't open until April next year with the first real pay rise not expected until 2028. The agreement also doesn't include freelance carers like yourself, Georgia. Georgia, you've also worked as an unpaid family carer for your own mother. Could you just tell us what financial support is available for people who have to give up work and do this?

None, really. I mean, the carer's allowance, that's a whole scandal in it. itself. So I claim universal credit and I claim, or I'm entitled, I hate that word, when it comes to benefits, to an extra £200 a month because I care for somebody. But the fair pay agreement. 2028. And they've been talking about it for how long? I mean, Baroness case is going to bring this consultation forward by a year because Andy told her to. And absolutely, we've been talking about the crisis in the care sector. Well, when did I come back to say?

Well, certainly since 2012, I've been aware of the crisis. There's been a crisis in the care sector for as long as there has been a care sector because it is seen as unskilled, low pay, and that suits their narrative. Whether it is unskilled is academic. until you've actually had to go and lift a 16 stone man out of bed and help him into his bath. I'm a contortionist, a weightlifter, a dog walker. It's like if we added up all the pay grades of things that I am probably Clementina does today, we'd probably be on about the same pay as a consultant, doctor.

I would like to add that, especially for migrants' careworkers, is never enough. So they are literally struggling. And most times you're focused on, you're thinking about the bills. You're thinking about hands. I'm in survival mode. It doesn't make you give in your best. We don't get paid travel time. So I'm getting up at 6 o'clock in the morning and I'm walking up until 10 p.m.

And I'm getting 10 hours pay. So when I go to a client's house, and instead of me to give my, on divided attention to that person. I'm distracted because I'm already thinking of how to meet up with the next client so that I'll be able to meet up my hours. So I'll be able to pay my bills. I've been in England going to four years now and just talking about the pay. There's still nothing has been done. They're still talking about it. And they're saying till 2028, they'll still keep talking about it. So we'll see. Coming up, what happens when the job you cross the world force suddenly disappears through no

fault of your own, we'll look at the trap that tens of thousands of care workers have found themselves in. But first, let's take a quick break. Two and five Canadians will hear the words you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters. On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation walk. Challenge yourself, friends and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer. Register today at pmcf walk.ca.ca. In Toronto, every arrival is a statement, and nothing says it better than this. Cadillac Optic was the number one selling luxury EV in Canada for 2025. Find your rhythm across a seamless 33-inch display and an immersive 19-speaker

AKG surround audio system. This city demands agility, and Optic delivers with precision. To make every drive extraordinary. Let's take the Cadillac. Find out more at Cadillac Canada.ca. Luxury sales claim based on S&P Global Mobility, Canadian New Vehicle Total Registrations for calendar year 2025 for the Cadillac definition of luxury. Welcome back to Media Storm.

Before the break, we heard about some of the issues gutting our care workforce. Now we want to look at how Britain imported a solution and then changed its mind. When Brexit happened, the UK saw a mass exodus of European workers. who often did jobs Brits were reluctant to do. Now, faced with a looming labour crisis in the sector, the government opened the skilled worker visa to care workers in 2022. Quick note that when we're trying to pull people in, we class care work as skilled, but when we're actually allocating rights and pay, we class them as lower skilled. Applications multiplied six times.

The UK hit record net migration. Georgia, when it comes to this wave of immigration, the press often fixates on scary numbers without looking at what's really behind them. When health and care worker visas saw net migration numbers peak, the media message was to panic. But from inside the care sector, did those arrivals feel like a cause for panic or did they feel needed? I think they felt needed. I mean, Boris went off and, you know, said, I'm going to fix adult social care. And, you know, I'm going to get the workers that we need. And off he went and he offered the migrant care workers, jobs, pay, stability. And then, yeah, they just pulled the carpet from them.

The reason why we did that was because we didn't have enough care workers. And we still haven't got enough care workers. We talk about an aging population. And it's not until you actually, I mean, it was last month, August, I got called elderly or fell into the elderly category twice and I'm 65 and I'm 66 at the end of this year. I don't consider myself to be elderly because obviously in my mind I'm still 36 and fabulous but getting old creeps up on you and so all of a sudden somebody like Helena and Matilda I'm elderly and to my children who are in their 40s.

I am elderly. They're going to have to start thinking about who is going to look after me when I go totally gaga. And the migrant care workers came to this country with an open heart, a willingness to work. They tend to be more skilled than us because English people do think. All they do is wipe your bottom and make you a cup of tea because nobody actually thinks that they're not going to be able to wipe their own bottom one day. In the backlash to the record net migration figures of 2023, the UK has squeezed the very workforce it relies on. The media has reported on the falling numbers, but barely covered the human cost of it. lived experience pieces about the dependence ban splitting up families or the sponsorship debt trap live overwhelmingly in specialist outlets like community care, the Bureau of Investigative

Journalism, Work Rights Centre or the occasional Guardian piece. They are absent from front page framing, which is dominated by the numbers. Clementina, we're hoping you can help us fix that now. So one of the first crackdown policies was the ban on care workers bringing dependents. In other words, their husbands or wives or even children. What did that policy mean for the people you know and their families? It's heartbreaking because you're telling people now to come in to care for your loved ones and they leave their loved ones miles in different parts of the world. It's heartbreaking.

Actually, it's something that also the media really really. really fixates on the question of dependence. In the introduction of this episode, Helen and I talked about this article in the Times, which quoted false data. It said 12 care workers from Cameroon had brought 180 dependents to the UK. That number was completely, completely false. It actually related to like 1,800 workers. But the Times got its dodgy data straight from the Conservative Party.

It was repeated all over the media. and G.B. News, they were complaining about how Cameroonians are bringing over their whole village. Clementina, when you hear stories like that in the press, headlines about migrant carers gaming the system. How does it make you feel? Really, it's heartbreaking because there are people who genuinely pass through the system. There are requirements that was met before they got these jobs and also got their visas. There were visc fees that were paid. So now saying that they're bringing dependents without having facts

and just claiming or quoting numbers, it's not fair really. Yeah, like I said, they are not focused on the problem. They're just trying to make the headlines with these stories. And the government brought in several more policies to cull the migrant care work. force. They closed the health visa route to social carers entirely and revoked the licenses from thousands of care recruiters. Unfortunately, this has created a trap into which some 40,000 care workers are estimated to have fallen. A migrant care visa is tied into one sponsoring employer, leave or lose that employer, and you then have 60 days to find another licensed sponsor or leave the country.

If the government revokes that employer's license, even due to the employer's wrongdoing, it's the worker who loses the status. Migrant care workers are subject to no recourse to public funds, meaning they cannot claim any benefits in this time, even if they lose their job because the government removes their employer's license. Many in this position have outstanding recruitment debts. The government did establish a scheme to help reallocate care workers whose employer lost their license, But Freedom of Information data shows only 3.4% of displaced care workers found new sponsored work through this scheme. Georgia, as a British care worker who may have seen colleagues go through this, who's seen this in the system, how do you feel about the way this system works in averted commas? I'm just angry. I'm just so angry.

Just as you read it out, Helena, if you read that out to anybody that wasn't involved in this, the care industry. It's just interesting. It's a nonsense. And G.B. News and reform, I just hope they get a migrant care worker when they're unable to wipe their own bottoms. Here. Claremontina, the government's crackdown on employer licenses and their ban on overseas recruitment. They sold this as protecting workers from exploitation. From where you sit, have these policies. done more to protect care workers or punish them? Honestly, punish them. Why make care workers go through mistakes from their employers?

So I think that's where the exploitation comes in because you're working for an employer. You're seeing what you think you should misdemeanor. You can't do that because if that employer loses the license, you're affected. So these employers tend to abuse careworkers as well because if you complain and say, I'm not getting my hours, and you report to the authorities, the license get revoked, you are affected.

So while I think I need to go to a different environment where I want to have my career progression, I've talked to an employer for five years, that's bad enough for you to now say 15 years. So you're literally taking 15 years of somebody's life. It's more like modern-day slavery to me. People should be able to work for whoever they want to work for, who they choose to work for, who they are comfortable working with. How can someone work in one spot for 15 years? And also what you're talking about there with that 15-year timeline, that's the new settlement timeline for migrant care workers.

So another one of these policies designed to cut immigration numbers is Labor's new white paper, which doubles the standard road of settlement from five to ten years and sets it as 15 years for care workers because they are ranked as lower skilled. This was also applied retrospectively to people who had come here, having been promised that it was five years until settlement. This has been laid out in Labor's white paper.

We're expecting to see the final policies announced this autumn. Clementina, can we ask how, many years had you been here and how many years do you now face until you get settled status? While we wait for the policy, yeah, the uncertainty is mentally draining to say you're not sure if the five years is going to be increasing to 15 years because there are people who have just a couple of months to go. There are people who have just one year more to do and you're coming back to say no, it's now 15 years. You pay these people low. They pay taxes, they pay their bills, they're not entitled to benefit. And you want them to do that for 15 years. And the highest-key jobs,

the doctors, the people who earn more, you're giving them lower settlement time. They earn more. They have the fund to pay their bills, their daily living tax. But you're giving them a shorter time for settlement and the libid low skill ones, you just want to keep them in a sport for 15 years. I don't think that's, that's not fair, really, especially people who had already come, because that was not what you promised them. You had said, this is the policy. And that's why people, people gave up their lives, their family, extended families to come and, you know, build in England. But then again, on arrival, you are just changing your own. Now underneath the issues we've discussed here, low pay exploitation, there's a deeper issue

about how we value people, right? Including how we value older people. Georgia, you care for people near the end of their lives. How do you feel about attitudes in our society towards elderly people? Well, I'm becoming one apparently. Never. It's people talk a lot about death today about the importance of being with somebody when they're going to take their last breath. So when you are privileged enough to stand there, to hold their hand, you know, to let them know that they're not alone is a very special thing.

It's a real privilege. I think that that needs thinking about our obsession with what our end is going to be like, about how we're going to be buried and who's going to get. the money and how are we going to pay for it. It all becomes a bit of a headline, but to actually sit with somebody as they take their last breath is probably one of the biggest privileges that you can be afforded. And Clementina, the same question to you, what have you noticed about how Britain treats its elders? And is that understood differently in different parts of the world than it is here? So I would say why I come from, all the people are often true with such honor.

We see them as the ones with the wisdom, with understanding, who have been through life. But here, rather than treat them, they see them as boarding. Sometimes you go to someone and they haven't seen your kids in years.

You are the only one that comes in and go out of the property and I look forward to seeing you. And, you know, it's heartbreaking to see that that's how the system is. Now finally, we want to talk about solutions. Georgia, we are told by the government that the solution to them closing the migrant carer route

is that more Brits are going to do the work. Is that the case? And what would have to actually change to bring in more British workers? Good luck with that, really. I mean, the average person doesn't think that they are going to need care. They just never, ever, ever think about it. it and nobody really wants to do it, which is why we've always had such a prolification of migrant care workers. And now, they're all going to solve adult social care by, you know,

we can't have migrant care workers anymore and you're going to have to do it. Well, an unskilled, low-paid job doesn't matter you're going to have to do it. I mean, I can't wait to see the advertising campaign. Clementina, you have seen this system. at its most brutal. If you could speak directly to the minister responsible or the government, what is the main change that you would ask for? So I would say treat careworkers with dignity, treat them as skilled workers and pay them fairly.

I think just finally to close the episode, could you each just tell us one thing that you really love about the job, that you love about care work? I love being able to add value to somebody's life when they are feeling vulnerable. Being able to reach out giving her to someone who really needs it. It's just making a whole lot of difference. Being able to be there to someone who desperately needs the help and the care. It just makes you feel like a better person.

Georgia, Clementina, thank you so much for joining us here on media. Storm and being so open with your experiences. Thank you for the amazing work that you do for our society. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. Thank you and thank you for having me. Thank you for listening. Next week, as the heat waves subside for now, we'll be looking at a summer of climate misinformation and how media lies about net zero are spread.

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