Martin Green on the social care workforce, four years on

In August 2022, Professor Martin Green OBE told us the sector needed a ten-year workforce strategy, portable qualifications and terms and conditions aligned with the NHS. The Chief Executive of Care England has now answered the same questions again in writing. The government has acknowledged some of what he asked for. The route he said was helping to fill vacancies has been closed.

Vacancies and the workforce strategy

Vacancies have eased a little. “In recent months we have seen a slight decrease in the number of vacancies,” Green says, “but the closure of the overseas recruitment route will have an impact in the future.” The government has now acknowledged the need for a long-term workforce strategy, to add to the workforce pathway and the work of Skills for Care, and he hopes “this new approach to a coherent workforce strategy will help us recruit and retain more staff”.

Skills for Care’s latest figures bear out the direction of travel. Its 2025/26 report puts the adult social care vacancy rate at 6.2%, or about 96,000 posts. That is down from 7.0% (108,000 posts) a year earlier and the lowest since 2015/16, against a peak of 10.4% in 2021/22. The rate is still around three times that of the wider economy.

The visa route has closed

Overseas recruitment is where his answer has moved furthest. In 2022 he said care worker visas had “undoubtedly” helped, and that more providers would look abroad if they could not recruit at home. Now the government has closed the route for the sector. It has been forced into a U-turn on the indefinite leave to remain timeframes, Green says, but that does not change the position: overseas recruitment, which was so important to the care sector, “is no longer an option”. The Home Office closed the care worker and senior care worker routes to new overseas applicants on 22 July 2025.

Zero hours contracts and local authority funding

The Employment Rights Act is the next pressure. Green expects it to “significantly reduce the number of zero hours contracts”, though he notes that some staff like them because they give added flexibility. His objection is to the funding. “Local authorities continue to commission some homecare services on a minute by minute basis and do not guarantee hours,” he says, which makes it very difficult to guarantee staff shifts while the Act adds financial burdens to an already fragile sector. That is close to what he argued in 2022, when he called zero hours contracts “a fundamental issue of underfunding” and not a problem of the contract itself.

A fair pay agreement may help recruitment, he adds, but only if it is funded. Without funding, some services will close and some employers will not take on more staff.

The government’s response to its consultation says the first fair pay agreement will take effect in April 2028, backed by £500 million for councils in its first year.

The Care Certificate and portable qualifications

On the Care Certificate, his position is unchanged and his hope is that a workforce strategy and career pathway will act on it. He wants a review of all the qualifications within social care, with clear skills and competency frameworks and portable qualifications that “must form the centre of any new approach to developing the workforce”.

Alignment with the NHS

The Prime Minister has said he wants terms and conditions in social care more closely aligned with the NHS. In 2022, Green argued that this would make people see social care as “a valid part of the system”. His answer now is about cost. “It is difficult to see how this can be achieved without billions being invested in social care,” he says. “The NHS pension liabilities would bankrupt the sector overnight.”