We’re proud to hire overseas workers – because without them, care would suffer
13 May 2025, 09:23
At Methodist Homes, our overseas workers play a valuable role in caring for and supporting hundreds of older people every day in our care homes and retirement living settings.
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We’ve sponsored more than 700 colleagues, all of whom have become valued members of our teams, making sure older people can live later life well. They are forging a new life in their local community and contributing economically.
While we do prioritise local recruitment, shortages in some regions have made this especially challenging, so historically we have had to rely on using expensive agency staff. To put this into context, our bill for agency workers in 2023/24, when we found we needed to start recruiting overseas workers, was around £30 million per year.
Having to draw on agency staff helps no one. For our residents, they don’t get continuity of care from individuals who get to know them well. For ourselves and other providers, this increases our costs in a sector which is already significantly underfunded, putting pressure on budgets.
Our costs therefore rise and are not met by local authorities and health bodies when they place people with us. In extreme cases, it might mean we have to restrict the number of people we can care for in our homes if we can’t recruit enough people locally. Workers from overseas have alleviated some of this pressure.
The White Paper talks about vacancies in the care sector being historically driven by levels of poor pay, and poor terms and conditions leading to low recruitment and retention rates.
At Methodist Homes, we are proud to be a Real Living Wage employer and have a higher retention rate than many among our care workers. But pay is a huge challenge when local authorities are unable to meet the true cost of care.
Yes, the Government has proposed a Fair Pay agreement for care workers, which is a positive step towards supporting ‘domestic’ recruitment, but it risks arriving too late. Fair Pay needs full funding by the Government, as, without it, it will place even more strain on a sector already struggling with low investment.
The Casey Commission on social care is starting to look at how a national care service can be established. It talks about how its aim is to make adult social care more productive, preventative and to give people who draw on care, and their families and carers, more power in the system.
In her considerations, Baroness Louise Casey must take into account the social care workforce and address the issues the Government raises in the White Paper.
With Skills for Care projecting a need for 540,000 additional care workers by 2040, current recruitment struggles are a warning sign of deeper issues ahead, and of the importance of overseas workers as an integral part of the solution for the sector.
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Sam Monaghan is Chief Executive of Methodist Homes (MHA), the country’s largest charitable care provider.
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