CARE HOMES may face a staff crisis after Brexit if EU workers are not allowed to remain in the UK.

The charity Independent Age has said the 84,000 EU care workers currently in the country should be allowed to stay.

A spokesman for Four Seasons Health Care who manage Ross Wyld Care Home in Walthamstow said they are unsure about what Brexit will mean for the company.

He said: “There is no doubt about the important and valuable contribution that nurses and other staff who were trained overseas make in caring for people in our care homes and hospitals.

“Four Seasons Health Care has some 20,000 patients/residents being cared for by around 30,000 staff including a complement of more than 4,500 nurses.

“The effects that Brexit will eventually have are not yet clear, but it seems apparent that unless there is some special arrangement it will not be so easy to recruit nurses from the EC countries to work here.

“The UK's health and social care services will continue to need overseas qualified nurses for the foreseeable future and as a country we should be assuring them that we value them and that they have a future here.”

In 2015 there were 98,000 nurses who had qualified overseas working in the UK, which amounts to one in seven in the country.

Around a third of these nurses came from European countries.

Simon Bottery, director of policy at Independent Age, said: “Care services for elderly and disabled people have come to rely on migrant workers, especially from the European Union, so the consequences could be severe if they are unable to work here in future.

“As with the NHS, we need to secure the right for these essential workers to remain in the UK.

“But in the longer term we have to recruit more British born workers to social care and that means making sure that they are well paid, well trained and secure in their jobs.

“That can’t happen without a commitment to fund the care sector properly.”