by Mithran Samuel – Adults, Social work leaders, Workforce
Councils will be able use a £15m international recruitment fund to source social workers from overseas to work in adults’ services, the UK government has confirmed.
The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) said that, though the focus of the fund should be on recruiting care workers, it could also be used to help source social workers, occupational therapists or nurses.
The fund will be available in 2023-24 and is one of the DHSC’s responses to adult social care’s worsening staff shortages, with vacancies across the sector in England having risen by 52% in 2021-22.
This has been attributed to the impact of increased competition for staff from other low-wage sectors, such as retail, or the NHS, staff burnout as a result of Covid and a reduced supply of workers from Europe due to Brexit.
The government, NHS and sector leaders see the staff shortage as a key factor in problems including the high volume of delayed discharges from hospitals and long waiting lists for social care assessments and packages.
Reducing recruitment barriers
The international recruitment fund is designed to reduce barriers to sourcing staff from abroad, particularly for small or medium-sized care providers, including due to administrative complexity and costs.
In guidance published this week, the DHSC said councils and providers needed to form regional or sub-regional partnerships for managing the resource, with a lead local authority selected to receive the funding.
It said partnerships could use the fund to
help providers attract overseas candidates;
create a shared recruitment resource that looked at the whole region’s needs;
provide an advice or checking service for sponsorship licence or visa applications;
help new arrivals to access affordable housing;
assist recruits with work travel requirements, for example, helping them gain a UK driving licence;
provide pastoral support, such as buddying schemes.
The DHSC has set a maximum funding allowance for each of the nine English regions but is requiring lead local authorities to submit applications setting out how much they need and what it would be used for, by 24 February 2023.
The lead council must ensure that the application “reflects a consensus view across the collaborating partners”.
It is unclear how far partnerships will use the recruitment fund to source social workers. While vacancy rates rose for council adults’ practitioners from 2020-21, from 7.5% to 9.5%, they were below levels for nurses (14.6%), personal assistants (13.1%), home care staff (13%), registered managers (12.8%) and frontline care staff generally (11.8%), as of April 2022.
More overseas social workers applying for registration
The launch of the fund comes amid a rise in the number of practitioners from overseas applying for registration in England.
Social Work England said it received 411 applications from overseas in October to December 2022, a 30% rise on the 314 received in the same period in 2021, in a paper to its board meeting last month.
It said most had come from social workers from South Africa, Zimbabwe and India.
Due to the increase in application numbers and a rule change in July 2022 giving practitioners up to 28 days, rather than 14, to respond to requests for further information, the median number of days the regulator took to process applications rose from seven to 34 days, from April to December last year.
Social Work England said it was allocating more resources to its overseas applications team to address the issue.
‘More urgency needed to tackle crisis’
In relation to the fund’s core purpose, to address the increasing workforce shortages in the care sector, provider representative body Care England said it was a “step in the right direction”.
However, chief executive Martin Green said it was “deeply concerning that the Department of Health and Social Care is not acting with more urgency to address the workforce crisis”.
“The care sector is in dire need of support, and it’s imperative that the government takes immediate and decisive action to address this critical issue through longer-term planning, rather than continuous short-term funds,” he added.
“The ongoing neglect of the social care sector is putting an unsustainable burden on the NHS and endangering the health and well-being of the most vulnerable members of our society.”
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