Sensei

The numbers they don’t want you to know about immigrant care workers. 1/6 The anti-immigration circus is on a full-on attack, citing numbers they don't understand, and almost all the figures they cite are wrong. First, the cost. An 85-year-old woman who can’t wash or dress herself receives 14 hours of care a week. This costs the council £351 (£25.05 an hour). If no care worker comes and she ends up in hospital, the NHS spends £3,934 a week (£562 a day), which is 11 times the cost. As of March 2026, an estimated 150,000 direct care posts in England’s private and charity-run care providers were filled by Health and Care visa holders. Taking the average working hours in the sector, this comes to about 225 million hours of care a year, worth £5.6bn at the rates councils pay. For every £1 spent on social care, the NHS saves between 20p and 35p. So these workers save the NHS between £1.1bn and £2bn a year. The total lifetime cost of these care workers and their adult dependants comes to £9.5bn. The NHS savings alone pay this back within 9 years. And if no care worker comes, the family steps in. In March 2026, 1.4 million people were claiming Carer’s Allowance, 56,800 more than in February 2025. It pays £86.45 a week for at least 35 hours of care a week. In the UK, 544,000 working-age carers are out of work because of caring. This costs the economy £37bn a year in lost output. And this figure only includes those caring for people of working age. A daughter who has left her job to care for her 85-year-old mother isn’t even included in it. So, how much does an unpaid family carer cost the taxpayer? According to UK data from 2017 to 2020, a working-age family carer who provides 10 or more hours of care a week costs the state £5,339 a year more than someone in a similar situation who doesn’t provide care: £3,691 in benefits, £1,620 in lost tax and £28 in extra NHS costs. And demand will only keep rising; in England alone, 410,000 more care posts will be needed by 2040, just to keep pace with the growth in the population aged 65 and over. The number of people with dementia in the UK is projected to rise from 982,000 in 2024 to 1.4 million by 2040. Meanwhile, British workers in care are down 130,000 since 2020/21.