I Run a Care Home in Kent: Overseas Care Workers Are Essential to Social Care

This is a Guest Post

I run a care home in Kent. That means when politicians talk about “foreign labour”, I don’t see a statistic or a convenient line for social media. I see the people who get residents out of bed, wash them, dress them, feed them, reassure them when they’re frightened and sit beside them when their families can’t be there.

So I’ve got a problem with Kent County Council leader Linden Kemkaran declaring that Britain must break its “20 year plus addiction to importing and hiring cheap foreign labour”. Not because immigration shouldn’t be controlled. It should. Not because Britain shouldn’t recruit and train more British care workers. We absolutely should. My problem is that Kemkaran’s rhetoric conveniently skips over what her own council knows about the people actually keeping Kent’s care system going.

And KCC knows an awful lot.

In July 2025, Kemkaran and the then Cabinet Member for Adult Social Care, Diane Morton, jointly wrote to ministers about plans to close the Social Care Worker Visa route to new overseas applicants. They didn’t shrug their shoulders and say Kent could manage without foreign workers. They raised “grave concern”. KCC said approximately 150 providers across its adult social-care contracts held sponsorship licences and estimated that 20–25% of its social-care workforce was from overseas. The council warned that the changes risked providers being left “on a cliff edge”.

That was barely a year before Kemkaran started talking about an addiction to cheap foreign labour.

Now look at the workforce rather than the politics. Skills for Care’s latest complete local dataset puts Kent at about 46,000 adult-social-care posts in 2024/25. Around 44,000 were filled and 2,700 were vacant. The vacancy rate was 6.2%. Staff turnover was 22.6%. More than half — 54% — of people starting jobs had come from another adult-social-care employer, so quite a bit of recruitment is simply employers moving existing workers around the same labour pool.

There’s another figure Kemkaran ought to ponder before reaching for the phrase “cheap foreign labour”. Only 66% of Kent’s adult-social-care workforce identified as British; 29% identified as non-EU nationals and 5% as EU nationals. To be absolutely clear, nationality isn’t the same thing as having been recruited from overseas, so it’d be wrong to call that whole 34% an internationally recruited workforce. But it does show just how international Kent’s care workforce has become.

We’re going to need more of them, too — or more people from somewhere.

KCC’s own Adult Social Care Prevention Framework says Kent’s population aged 65 and over is expected to increase by 28% in the next decade. The number aged over 85 is projected to rise by 53% by 2035. If the trajectory of need doesn’t change and costs merely remain at 2024 levels, KCC calculates the cost of meeting the needs of over-65s alone will rise by at least 48% by 2035. It also estimates around 10,000 people in Kent’s adult-social-care workforce will reach retirement age during the next ten years.

That’s the bit slogans don’t solve.

Kemkaran doesn’t even have to take my word for the consequences of losing overseas workers. She can read KCC’s Corporate Risk Register. It says recruitment and retention are difficult across adult social care and that providers struggle to compete with sectors such as retail. On home care specifically, KCC records that overseas workers have added capacity and that visa changes restricting families have reduced applications from overseas care workers. The risks identified by the council include gaps in services, delayed hospital discharge, reduced quality and significant numbers of care-home closures or service failures.

So which is it? An “addiction” Kent needs to kick, or capacity Kent’s care system needs?

Cllr Diane Morton’s position was hardly convincing either – pictured. In November 2025 she told Full Council that migrant workers’ “contribution is deeply valued”. In the same answer, however, she said Britain should encourage “indigenous British people” into care rather than relying on labour from abroad to “prop up our care system”. I’m perfectly happy with the first half of that argument: train more people here, give care a proper career structure and pay them properly. But you can’t praise migrant workers as vital to the stability of Kent’s system and then talk about them as if they’re merely a prop you’d rather remove.

Especially when the economics are staring you in the face.

As at March 2025, Skills for Care put average independent-sector pay in Kent at just £12.13 an hour for a care worker and £12.77 for a senior care worker. Twenty-five per cent of Kent’s workforce was already aged 55 or over, while only 7% was under 25. We can talk about attracting British workers until the cows come home, but if we want somebody to choose intimate personal care, dementia care, night shifts and weekend work over another job offering comparable or better money with less responsibility, then we’ve got to make the job worth choosing.

Care isn’t “low value” work simply because we’ve spent years paying people as though it is.

Then there’s Cllr Georgia Foster. Morton stepped down in May 2026 and Foster inherited the Adult Social Care portfolio. I’m not going to put Kemkaran’s words into Foster’s mouth because I can’t find evidence that Foster herself has used the “cheap foreign labour” language. But she’s now the Cabinet Member responsible for this service, so the workforce problem is hers to answer.

Her first Cabinet update in June talked about her induction, visits to services, staff qualifications, carers and the dedication of employees. All perfectly pleasant. What it didn’t set out was a quantified replacement plan showing how many additional UK workers KCC expects Kent’s care sector to recruit, what vacancy and retention targets it wants providers to reach, or how reliance on internationally recruited workers is supposed to fall. KCC itself had said a strategic workforce plan was due in 2026/27. If Foster and Kemkaran seriously intend to “wean” Kent off overseas labour, those figures matter rather more than political catchphrases.

Money isn’t exactly behaving itself either.

KCC’s final 2025/26 accounts show Adult Social Care and Health had a £701.6 million budget and spent £744.5 million — a £42.9 million overspend. Of that, £20.7 million related to savings that weren’t achieved and £22.2 million to other pressures. Older People’s Residential Care Services alone were £25.4 million over budget, including £19.8 million from higher-than-budgeted demand. Older People’s Community Based Services were £17.5 million over, mainly because home-care activity and costs were higher than budgeted. Provider closures added another £1.3 million to residential placement costs.

KCC’s risk register adds another sobering number: the average cost of residential care rose 87% between 2021/22 and December 2025.

Yet Kemkaran’s own August 2026 “One Year On” report talks about building a “sustainable and resilient” care market while admitting demand is increasing because Kent is getting older and needs are becoming more complex. It repeats the £42.9 million overspend and points to stronger contracts and provider engagement. What that report doesn’t provide is the number I’d really like to see alongside her comments about foreign labour: how much has Kent’s reliance on internationally recruited care workers actually fallen since KCC said 20–25% of its workforce was from overseas in July 2025?

At present, we can’t properly answer that from the annual local workforce dataset because Skills for Care’s Kent update covering 2025/26 isn’t due until 15 October 2026. The latest complete local figures are still 2024/25. That’s an important limitation, and anybody claiming the latest annual Kent data proves either success or failure would be getting ahead of the evidence.

But the evidence we do have certainly doesn’t show a workforce awash with spare capacity.

And Whitehall isn’t helping. The Home Office’s “earned settlement” consultation proposed extending the qualifying period to 15 years for Skilled Worker migrants in jobs below RQF level 6. Its own document specifically identifies care workers and senior care workers among the below-RQF-6 occupations affected by this policy thinking. The proposal matters particularly because many of the workers brought here through the Health and Care route since 2022 are precisely the people who’ve filled staffing gaps in social care.

Fifteen years strikes me as just plain daft.

Under the rules still published on GOV.UK, eligible Skilled Worker and Health and Care Worker visa holders can currently apply for indefinite leave to remain after five years. The proposed 15-year route hasn’t simply replaced that rule: it formed part of the consultation, which closed in February 2026 after more than 200,000 responses. So this needs reporting accurately as a proposal, not as current law.

But think about what the proposal says to a care worker already here. We’re happy for you to get an elderly Kent resident out of bed. We’re happy for you to work Christmas, deal with dementia, administer personal care and spend years paying tax. We’re happy for a care provider to depend upon you. But permanent security might be pushed years further down the road because Whitehall has classified your occupation below degree level. That may make sense on an immigration spreadsheet; from where I sit, trying to retain experienced people, it looks thoroughly self-defeating.

None of this means overseas recruitment should be a permanent substitute for decent pay, training and a serious domestic workforce strategy. Morton was right about that much. Exploitation of sponsored workers also needs stamping out; KCC itself records cases where sponsorship licences were revoked and workers displaced.

But there’s a world of difference between building a British care workforce over time and pretending the existing overseas workforce is an embarrassing habit we can simply kick.

So I’d like Kemkaran and Foster to publish the numbers. How many sponsored care workers are working in Kent now? How many of those roughly 150 providers still hold sponsorship licences? How many UK-resident recruits entered care during 2025/26? How many stayed six months or a year? What are vacancy, turnover and agency-use rates? And, crucially, what proportion of Kent’s care workforce is internationally recruited today compared with July 2025? Until those numbers are on the table, nobody can seriously claim Kent is “weaning itself off” foreign labour.

I don’t employ nationalities. I employ people who can care.

Kent’s older population is growing rapidly, thousands of existing care workers are approaching retirement and KCC is already overspending by tens of millions trying to meet demand. Kemkaran can call overseas workers “cheap foreign labour” if she wants. Morton can talk about not letting them “prop up” the system. Foster can inherit the portfolio and talk about resilience. But sooner or later all three have to answer the same rather less glamorous question that every care-home operator faces at the start of a shift: who, exactly, is going to do the caring?

The views expressed in this guest post are those of the individual contributor and do not necessarily reflect those of the Shepway Vox Team.

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