Rt Hon Yvette Cooper MP, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Department of Health and Social Care
Rt Hon Shabana Mahmood MP, Secretary of State for the Home Department, Home Office
RE: Building the workforce strand of the National Care Service
Dear Secretaries of State,
Yesterday the Prime Minister committed to end “decades of political drift” on social care, setting out plans to accelerate the creation of a National Care Service, and to govern this issue by “a new way of doing politics” – cross-party, evidence-led, built with the sector rather than around it.
The Secretary of State – Rt Hon Yvette Cooper MP’s – own remarks, invoking Barbara Castle’s insistence that health and social care must work hand in hand, set the same test. We write to help meet it. Labour Mobility Partnerships (LaMP) has spent 15 months building the evidence base for exactly the kind of workforce reform now under discussion: over 100 organisations consulted – providers, employers, worker representatives and migration policy experts – with findings tested publicly at the APPG on Migration and Adult Social Care roundtable on 9 June, chaired by Tim Farron MP, and set out in full in our forthcoming White Paper. The proposals below are the product of that work.
With Baroness Casey’s Commission now accelerated to report next summer, the Big Conversation on Care open for evidence, and Secretary Cooper chairing a new ministerial group to drive delivery, there are three live channels for this work to land in immediately. We ask you to use ours in all three. Workforce reform is also the one part of this agenda that does not have to wait for consensus on funding or system design – it can start now.
The scale of the problem
The UK’s over-80 population will nearly double by 2045, and the sector will need 470,000 additional care workers just to keep pace. Today, 131,000 posts sit unfilled. Left unaddressed, that gap means fewer care packages, more strain on unpaid family carers, and rising pressure on the NHS as gaps in social care provision push demand into acute settings.
We support the decision to close the overseas care visa route to new applicants in response to exploitation risks. But more than 20,000 migrant care workers displaced by sponsor licence revocations remain out of work a year on, with no clear route back into a sector short of hands.
That is not a side effect to manage – it is a workforce the system is currently wasting. No single lever fixes this. It needs the Department of Health and Social Care, the Home Office and the sector moving together, not in sequence.
Three actions the government can take now:
- Stand up a national registry of care workers. Most of the pieces already exist, scattered across programmes and institutions. Bringing them together – to verify skills, qualifications and immigration status in one place – is a coordination task, not a new build, and it is the fastest way to get displaced, already-trained workers back into vacant roles safely.
- Fund workforce matching and bridging support properly. Regional matching schemes convert only 10–15% of placements and vary sharply by region – a postcode lottery for displaced workers, made worse by recent funding cuts and no visibility on what comes next. Stable, predictable funding for skills recognition, matching and bridging support would fix this. More money without a plan will not.
- Extend the 60-day sponsor-change window to at least 120 days. Sixty days is not enough time for a displaced worker to find a new sponsor. It pushes trained, willing workers out of the sector for good. This sits with the Home Office, but the workforce cost lands on the Department of Health and Social Care – which is precisely the kind of cross-departmental gap this letter is asking you to close together.
Four principles to guide the workforce strand
These should sit alongside the Prime Minister’s own principles for the National Care Service:
- Industry-led and demand-driven – international recruitment should respond to evidenced shortages, via mechanisms such as a Temporary Shortage List, not be fixed in advance.
- Transparent and rights-respecting by design – with greater visa portability and stronger worker protections, so exploitation risk cannot again destabilise the sector.
- Complementary to domestic investment – international recruitment should support pay, progression and retention, not substitute for it.
- Standards set at source – government-to-government agreements with origin countries to strengthen ethical recruitment and pre-departure training.
We would welcome the chance to put this evidence directly to Secretary Cooper’s ministerial group, and to submit it formally to Baroness Casey’s Commission and the Big Conversation on Care. Our findings have already been stress-tested with the sector once, at the APPG roundtable in June – we would welcome the opportunity to do so again with government, before positions harden rather than after.
Yours sincerely,
Salvatore Petronella, Associate Director
Laurel Hart, Strategic Communications Manager
Labour Mobility Partnerships (LaMP)
