Oldham has received thousands of unskilled Eastern European migrants in recent years and we are constantly told our manufacturing, agricultural and health industries would collapse without them. Oldham has never had any agricultural industry and has a limited large scale manufacturing sector so why does Oldham receive so many migrants you would be forgiven for presuming it must be for the health and social care sector. Oldham Council Brexit documents from December 2017 reveal just 1% of the entire health and social care workforce in Oldham are from the EU. Health and social care is the largest employment sector in Oldham only the Council employs more people in the borough and that includes all local authority controlled school employees. We also reported in April 2017 how the Council appeared to be scrambling to access more EU funded schemes in the wake of Brexit and the Council’s document from December confirms that our observation was correct. Sadly these EU funded schemes are almost exclusively about deprivation and deprivation management with partners in the EU’s poorest areas. It is to the detriment of Oldham that the borough like other already impoverished areas has been forced to absorb the EU’s primary export which is foreign poverty.
Oldham Council Brexit update document