On Monday the Home Secretary stood up in the Commons and reversed one of the most damaging proposals social care has faced in years. Last November the government said that care workers who came here on the health and care visa could wait fifteen years for settlement, three times the original five years they were promised when they arrived. This week that became five years again for anyone who met the conditions of their visa, including earning £25,000 a year in the sector, provided they arrived before the May 2025 White Paper. The quarter who didn’t meet those conditions can apply for a new five-year care visa, not tied to their old employer, and apply for settlement at the end of it. In the Home Secretary’s words, “no one will be punished for the sins of their employer”.
I wrote here last week that no Registered Manager can reverse the fall in international recruitment, and that’s still true. The numbers are stark: 105,000 people came into the sector from abroad in 2023/24, 50,000 the year after and just over 30,000 in 2025/26, and the route closed to new overseas applicants in July 2025. What this week’s decision does is protect the people who are already here, and that’s more important than any recruitment figure. Around 250,000 people and their dependants came in on the care route between 2022 and 2025, and in fourteen years of working alongside providers I can’t think of a workforce policy whose reversal has brought so much relief to so many services at once. The Homecare Association’s survey in January found 28% of providers had already lost sponsored staff over the uncertainty, and half had been told staff would leave if the qualifying period went up. For those services, Monday was a very good day.
The government has done the right thing here, and it’s done it in the face of real political pressure. Care England, the Homecare Association, the King’s Fund and Mencap all said as much within hours, and so should the rest of us.
There’s a part of this I really want employers to hear, though. The protection is conditional on earnings, and earnings are something the employer controls. A sponsored care worker whose rota fell short, whose sponsor failed to pay them or whose sponsor lost its licence (and the Home Office has revoked around 1,800 of those licences) may now find they fall below £25,000 through no fault of their own. Dr Jane Townson of the Homecare Association put it well: describing a further five-year visa as a second chance “risks blaming people for circumstances beyond their control”. And the line is a very fine one. Skills for Care puts median care worker pay at £12.60 an hour, which on a full 37.5-hour week for a year comes, by my arithmetic, to about £24,570. The threshold for keeping the five-year route sits almost exactly at median full-time pay, so the difference between a worker who, in the Home Secretary’s phrase, “lived up to the promise” and one who has to start the clock again can be a few hours a week on the rota.
That leaves every provider with sponsored staff some practical work to do, and I’d start by finding out where each of them stands. Look at the earnings record for every sponsored worker you employ, year by year, and if anyone is close to the line because of hours rather than performance, fix the hours now rather than at the settlement application. I’d also make sure you’re the employer that displaced workers move to. The new visa isn’t tied to the old sponsor, and the government’s response document puts a number on the time people will have: from 1st February 2027, a care worker whose sponsor loses its licence gets 120 days to secure a new job offer and 60 more to sort out their visa, and after that it’s curtailed. Services with their sponsorship records in order, their right-to-work checks current and their pay evidence clean will be the ones able to take those people on quickly. And I’d remember that this decision protects the workforce you have, not the one you’ll need. Skills for Care’s figures show the number of British nationals in care posts fell by 40,000 last year and by 130,000 since 2020/21, while the sector needs 410,000 more posts by 2040. Monday didn’t change any of that.
There’s one more thing I’d say to government, and I suspect Dr Townson would say it with me. You can’t set an earnings condition for settlement and at the same time run a commissioning system in which some councils buy care at rates below the cost of employing someone on the National Living Wage. Care England has also pointed out that the funding for the regional partnerships that help displaced workers find new employment ends in March 2027, which is an odd way to honour a promise of greater protection. Fair settlement and fair commissioning are really the same argument, and the Fair Pay Agreement due in 2028 is where they meet.
So it’s five years again for the people who kept their side of the bargain, and this week the government kept its side. It’s now up to the employers who sponsored them to do the same.
Bill Watson, Director, Insequa