26/10/2025
Our 2025 Workforce Survey reveals a sector caught between immigration restrictions, chronic underfunding and increasing NHS responsibilities without payment. Key findings include:
🟠 Nearly 1 in 3 providers cannot meet current demand.
🟠 59% of providers employed sponsored workers in 2025.
🟠 72% report concern among overseas staff following policy changes.
🟠 7 in 10 providers deliver NHS tasks; only 26% receive extra funding.
🟠 65% say NHS staff don't provide appropriate ongoing clinical support.
The Government closed overseas recruitment in July 2025 with no credible plan to fill vacancies. Our report found nearly 9 in 10 providers report overseas careworkers contacted them because their primary sponsor couldn't give them enough hours. This is a direct consequence of poor commissioning.
Our Chief Executive, Dr Jane Townson OBE, said:
“Families across Britain are waiting for care that simply isn’t available in some places. Government underfunding and penny-pinching contracts have already driven carers away. Now they’ve pulled the plug on overseas recruitment too. It’s reckless, and people will suffer. The result is predictable: people go without support, deteriorate and end up in hospital, and then hospitals struggle to discharge them. Providers face impossible choices.
“There is no other business in the economy where Government would expect vital, skilled services to be delivered for free. It is unacceptable and unsustainable.”
The Homecare Association is calling for urgent action:
🟠 Ring-fence social care budgets and invest at least £1.6 billion to address historic underfunding in homecare.
🟠 Legislate for a National Contract for Care, with sustainable minimum fee rates.
🟠 Embed homecare providers as core partners in integrated Neighbourhood Teams so that careworkers are recognised as part of the community health and care workforce, not just “add-ons” contracted at arm’s length.
🟠 Develop a statutory workforce plan to ensure enough careworkers for an ageing population.
🟠 Expand Regional Partnerships to cover sponsored workers with insufficient hours and other employment issues, not just those displaced by licence revocations.
Without these reforms, millions risk going without vital care - not because providers don’t want to deliver it, but because Government policy has made it impossible.
🔗 Click here to read the full report: https://www.homecareassociation.org.uk/resource/voices-of-homecare-workforce.html
