The Three-Year Plan Problem in Social Care

By Carmen Neagu, 9 December 2025

The UK social care sector isn’t just evolving — it’s shifting faster than most providers can reasonably plan for. Over the last few years, change hasn’t followed a steady, predictable pattern. Immigration rules, sponsorship pathways, minimum wage increases, staffing costs, and local authority frameworks have all moved at different times and at different speeds.

And providers are expected to plan around all of it.

At an event I attended recently, the agenda centred on how software can help streamline operations and support profitability in the care sector. But when I spoke to attendees during the networking sessions, the conversation shifted to recruitment. Not just the difficulty of finding people, but the difficulty of building a workforce strategy when the rules keep changing.

Because here’s the reality many feel but rarely say out loud:

How do you write a meaningful three-year business plan when the foundations of your workforce can change twice in one year?

For new providers, a business plan is a mandatory part of CQC registration. But once you’re actually operating, the challenges become clear:

Local authority contracts sit within closed frameworks that may not reopen for years.
Minimum wage increases are inevitable, but the scale is unpredictable.
Staffing costs — pensions, contributions, training requirements — shift in ways that make long-term modelling incredibly difficult.
Immigration rules can change overnight, with little notice and immediate operational consequences.

A provider who built a three-year plan in 2022 has now revised it multiple times — immigration changes alone have forced several complete rewrites.

This newsletter isn’t about being alarmist. It’s about being honest about the environment providers are trying to operate in — and offering a practical, grounded way to adapt.

You can’t control policy, but you can control how prepared, resilient and agile your organisation is when change arrives.

Let’s break down what’s shifting, what it means for recruitment, and how to plan in a sector that doesn’t stand still.

The Data: How Overseas Recruitment Has Shifted Since 2021

Overseas recruitment transformed the care sector between 2021 and 2023. When vacancies were at a peak, the Health & Care Worker Visa route allowed providers to stabilise their workforce quickly.

But the numbers tell a story of growth followed by rapid contraction.

2021: Around 63,000 visas were issued to main applicants.
2023: That number surged to over 145,000.
2024–2025: After significant policy changes, numbers fell dramatically — caring personal service roles dropped by over 90%.

This shift is core to understanding today’s recruitment challenge. For many providers, overseas hiring was not just “part” of their strategy — it was the buffer that filled critical shortages. When that buffer is removed quickly, the pressure moves straight onto local pipelines.

Since 2021, policy change has come in waves. Some were expected. Many were not.

The most significant include:

Expansion (2021–2022): Care Worker and Senior Care Worker roles added to eligible visa routes.
Tightening (2023–2024): Stricter rules around dependants and sponsorship compliance.
April 2025: Providers required to prioritise candidates already living in the UK before looking overseas.
July 2025: A major shift — most providers are no longer able to sponsor new overseas Care Workers or Senior Care Workers.

Each change individually has impact. But collectively — and with short notice — they reshape workforce planning almost instantly.

For many organisations, stability hasn’t been the issue but predictability has.

Business Planning in a Sector That Changes Every Quarter

Providers know they must submit a business plan when registering with the CQC. And on paper, a three-year plan makes sense. In practice? It’s not always realistic. Here’s why long-term workforce planning has become so challenging:

1. Local authority contracts. Frameworks can remain closed for years. New providers can’t bid until renewal, even if there is unmet demand. This makes income modelling difficult, especially when private-pay markets are inconsistent across regions. Or frameworks are renewed with very different parameters and not enough time to prepare, so providers already on the framework can find themselves not part of the renewed one and locked out for years.

2. Minimum wage and staffing costs. You know they’re going up — you just don’t know by how much. When wage increases outpace contract uplift, providers feel the pressure first, especially when contract uplifts don’t cover the increases or don’t come into effect until months later.

3. Operational costs. Pensions, NI contributions, mandatory training, mileage, insurance — all shift independently of each other. Guidelines for care providers in terms of mandatory training change often and with little notice, but providing care without meeting requirements can be very damaging to your reputation, unsafe and costly to turn around.

4. Immigration rules. The speed of change has been the biggest disruptor. Providers have had rules announced, implemented, and enforced within weeks.

When that happens, you’re not just adjusting recruitment — you’re adjusting budgets, service capacity, future guarantees, and workforce structure.

This is why three-year plans become outdated so quickly: they’re built on variables that rarely stay still.

So What Can Providers Actually Plan For?

Not stability and most definitely not certainty, but they should plan for adaptability.

Over the next few years, the providers who stay resilient will be the ones who build a workforce model that doesn’t depend on a single recruitment pathway — and doesn’t collapse when policy changes.

Here’s where to focus:

1. Strengthen your USP. Why would staff choose you over another provider? It could be culture, training, progression, management quality, consistent rotas or supportive onboarding.

2. Build domestic pipelines and focus on retention. This is now essential and works in conjunction with defined USPs. Define your ideal candidate and look at what would attract them to your company. Then think about once you employ them, why should they stay? Retention is now the most cost-effective “recruitment strategy” you have. Small improvements in culture, communication and progression can dramatically reduce turnover — and therefore reduce exposure to external change.

3. Strengthen compliance and readiness. With increased scrutiny on sponsorship and employment standards, having robust processes reduces risk — and protects continuity. Apart from the quite obvious financial impact a fine received for employing someone illegally could have, the bad publicity alone could close a business.

4. Marketing, marketing, marketing. I can’t emphasise enough how a diverse pipeline of clients and a multi-channel candidate attraction plan is key! Exposure, word of mouth, referrals, paid for adverts, SEO, and regular outreach all apply on both ends of the spectrum — clients and candidates.

Final Thought

The social care sector is full of providers doing their absolute best in an environment that doesn’t always give them the clarity they need. But uncertainty doesn’t mean instability — it simply requires a different kind of leadership.

You don’t need perfect foresight, you just need a plan that bends without breaking.

If you’re reviewing your workforce model — or rewriting a plan for the third time — you’re not alone. The goal isn’t to predict every policy shift, it’s to build an organisation agile enough to move with them.

If you’d like support reviewing your recruitment strategy or planning for the next few years, feel free to get in touch.