Eyebrows were raised in the House of Lords this week as the Justice and Home Affairs Committee heard evidence that the Ministry of Justice is having to recruit from overseas to staff Britain’s overcrowded jails.
Mark Fairhurst, the national chairman of the Prison Officers’ Association, said:
We are recruiting from overseas and you are getting recruits from overseas, we have heard, turning up at the gate with suitcases and family in tow asking “Where is my accommodations?” […] We have got examples of overseas recruits sleeping in their cars because they have no accommodations.
Apparently there has been a bunch of overseas recruits who, because they have no accommodations, there is a wooded area opposite the prison where they are working at and they have set up camp there.
Last November, I reported that, for the first time ever, there were seven million migrants working in Britain’s labour force. But how much has the rest of the public sector come to rely on overseas workers? The Spectator’s data team has analysed the most recent figures available to find out.
Whilst the share of the overall workforce born overseas has risen from 12 per cent in 2009 to 20 per cent in 2022, the increase in certain parts of the public sector is even more striking. Over the same period, the share of the workforce in vocational training colleges has jumped from 9 per cent to 23 per cent, while in ‘library and archive activities’ it has doubled from 10 to 20 per cent. In universities, the proportion has risen from 17 per cent to 27 per cent.
When it comes to prisons and courts, however, the share has actually fallen by a percentage point between 2009 and 2022 – though the recent increase in overseas recruitment, highlighted by Fairhurst, will not yet be reflected in these older figures.
Zooming in on more recent changes across other parts of the public sector, some increases have been almost vertical, as the graph below shows:
What the Office for National Statistics (ONS) defines as ‘Compulsory social security activities’ (e.g., administration of pensions and benefits has seen the share of foreign-born workers rise from a low of 2 per cent in 2019 to 14 per cent in 2022. It’s hardly surprising that there may be more welfare related jobs to fill, given that Britain’s disability benefits caseload alone has grown by over half a million claimants (a 12 per cent rise) over the same period. That caseload is forecast to keep climbing – hitting just under eight million in four years’ time.
The sharpest rise in foreign workers has been seen in post-school education, which comes as little surprise given the huge increase in demand given student visas issued under the so-called ‘Boris wave’ helping to take the student population to its highest ever.
The question, of course, is: how large does our public sector workforce actually need to be? The NHS and social care sectors rely heavily on migrant workers to fill nursing, care, and medical roles that many Britons are increasingly unwilling to take on. With an ageing and increasingly unwell population, it is hard to see where else we could find the staff to fill these crucial positions. However, looking more broadly at the public sector workforce, the number employed in central government alone has risen by more than a third since 2009, and the UK now employs a greater share of its population in the civil service than communist China. Secure, well-pensioned jobs in the public sector, combined with open visa routes, will naturally attract migrants – but does the state really need to be as large as it has become?
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