Meeting of the Parliament 03 December 2025
I challenge Jackie Baillie to defend her Government’s approach to migration, which, in the words of the industry, is undermining our approach to recruitment and retention. She failed to do so because her leader describes it as “brave”. There is nothing brave about sacrificing our critical services for our people, in the cause of supporting a Faragist approach to migration.
We came to expect the draconian and Faragist approach to immigration from the Tories, but under a Labour Government, we have seen an even more severe approach, with a 77 per cent drop in the year ending June 2025 in the number of health and care visas granted by the Home Office. Labour went even further and closed the social care worker visa entirely, completely undermining our ability to provide care to the most vulnerable members of our society.
Labour will undoubtedly say today that its focus is on supporting jobs for Scottish care workers, but the reality is that the demographics of our ageing population mean that we do not have enough workers in Scotland. We not only need international workers to bolster our workforce; we also deeply value the contribution that they make.
Those international workers make up an estimated 26 per cent of our social care workforce. It is not brave—