Social Care’s Improving Workforce Figures ‘Mask A Growing Concern With No Plan To Address’
Care England, the largest and most representative body for independent adult social care providers in England, has responded to Skills for Care’s annual Size and Structure of the Adult Social Care Sector and Workforce report with a warning that headline figures showing the strongest workforce position in a decade obscure a more troubling picture of how that position is being sustained and how quickly it could deteriorate.
Reacting to the findings, Professor Martin Green OBE, Chief Executive of Care England, said:
“A falling vacancy rate looks like good news, and the government will be tempted to present it as such. But a vacancy rate tells you how many posts are filled today. It does not tell you whether the pipeline filling them is stable or sustainable. When you look at that question, what you find is a sector that has adapted to circumstances government created without any plan for what the sector would do instead. That is not a workforce strategy. It is luck, and luck is not something you can build a national care service on.”
The closure of the Health and Care Worker visa route to overseas applicants in July 2025 removed the primary managed route through which the sector had been recruiting internationally. In 2023/24 it brought an estimated 105,000 people into direct care roles in the independent sector. In 2025/26 the equivalent figure was 1,500. That gap has not been filled by domestic recruitment. It has been filled by people already in the UK moving into social care through dependent, family and student visas, a cohort that now accounts for 95% of international recruits. The sector’s reliance on international workers has not diminished. The route through which it accesses them has changed beyond recognition, with no workforce strategy, no monitoring framework and no government assessment of what this means for the years ahead.
At the same time, the number of posts filled by British nationals has fallen by 40,000 in 2025/26 alone; and by 130,000, or 10.8%, since 2020/21. Despite successive National Living Wage uplifts, experienced staff earn on average just 10p per hour more than those new to the sector. Care England’s Silent Pay Cut analysis shows that frozen tax thresholds are absorbing a meaningful portion of each headline wage increase, and by the time the first Fair Pay Agreement comes into force, care workers will have lost around £1.4 billion cumulatively through that effect alone. The Fair Pay Agreement, as currently scoped, will not reverse a domestic decline that has run for five consecutive years.
Professor Martin Green continued:
“The government closed the managed international recruitment route without understanding what the sector would do instead, and without a credible plan to build the domestic workforce that was supposed to replace it. The Fair Pay Agreement is welcome, but our own analysis shows it will not be sufficient on its own. We are asking the government to move quickly, because the workforce the Casey Commission is being asked to plan for is already changing in ways that are not visible in the headline figures.”
Behind the sector-wide vacancy rate of 6.2% sits a rate of approximately 9.1% in domiciliary care, compared with 3.8% to 3.9% in residential settings. The government’s ambition to shift care closer to home depends directly on a functioning domiciliary workforce. A vacancy rate two and a half times higher than the residential sector is a structural constraint on an agenda ministers have staked political capital on, and it cannot be addressed by pointing to a sector-wide average.
Professor Martin Green concluded:
“The number that should concern government most in the data is not 6.2%. It is 9.1%. That is the vacancy rate in domiciliary care, the part of the sector on which the entire ‘care closer to home’ agenda rests. You cannot shift care out of hospitals and into communities on a workforce with a vacancy rate like that, and government needs to be honest about that constraint, rather than celebrating reducing net migration figures while ignoring the consequences.”
Care England is calling on government to produce a transparent assessment of the shift in the sector’s international workforce pipeline; to engage honestly with the limitations of the Fair Pay Agreement as a response to domestic workforce decline; and to treat vacancy pressures in domiciliary care as a matter of urgent relevance to NHS reform delivery.
