The recruitment story nobody’s connected to lone worker safety yet
On 22 July 2025, the Home Office closed the Skilled Worker visa route to new overseas applicants for Care Worker (SOC 6135) and Senior Care Worker (SOC 6136) roles, under Statement of Changes HC 997. It’s been widely covered as an immigration and workforce planning story. What hasn’t been covered is the safety question underneath it: if your pool of experienced international recruits is shrinking, who is actually being sent to knock on a stranger’s door alone, and how ready are they when they get there.
This isn’t a claim that newer staff are less safe, because nobody has measured that directly. It’s a genuine gap in the sector’s own workforce data, and a reasonable question every registered manager should be asking right now, alongside the practical steps covered in our lone working policy guide for community health teams.
What actually changed on 22 July 2025
The closure ended new overseas sponsorship for frontline care worker and senior care worker roles. It didn’t touch anyone already in the UK on a Health and Care Visa in these codes: those workers can extend their visa, switch employer, or apply for settlement until a transition deadline of 22 July 2028. After that date, the roles come off the Immigration Salary List and Temporary Shortage Occupation List altogether.
The change sits inside a wider set of reforms. The general skill threshold for Skilled Worker sponsorship rose from RQF Level 3 to RQF Level 6 (degree level) on the same date, and care worker roles, sitting at RQF Level 2, only avoided immediate removal because of a temporary carve-out. Sponsors are explicitly barred from routing around the closure by sponsoring the same person under a different occupation code, such as nursing auxiliary roles, with sponsor licence revocation the stated consequence for doing so.
None of this changes an employer’s existing lone-worker duty under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 or the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999. What it changes is the practical shape of who’s available to meet that duty.
Why domiciliary care felt this more than most sectors
Domiciliary care has leaned on international recruitment more heavily than most parts of adult social care, precisely because it offers the flexible, community-based roles this route was built to fill. Skills for Care’s November 2025 “State of the Sector and Workforce” report shows the scale of the shift already underway: international recruitment into adult social care fell from 105,000 in 2023/24 to 50,000 in 2024/25, while the number of workers with British nationality fell by around 30,000 (2.6%) over the same period.
Read those two figures together and the picture isn’t simply “domestic workers replacing international ones.” Both routes tightened at once, in the same year the visa closure took effect. And yet total posts across adult social care still grew 2.2% in 2024/25, meaning providers absorbed the pressure rather than leaving rotas unfilled. Something had to give to make that arithmetic work, and it’s reasonable to assume some of it was recruiting and onboarding people faster than before.
The safety question the workforce data doesn’t answer
Here’s the honest limit of what can be said with confidence: there’s no published UK data directly measuring whether newer or less experienced domiciliary care staff face a different level of risk on lone visits than experienced colleagues. That research simply doesn’t exist yet.
What can be said is this: a worker who’s been doing home visits for two years has usually built up things an induction pack can’t teach quickly, a feel for which situations warrant a phone call to the office, which streets need a bit more awareness after dark, how a particular client’s mood on the doorstep tends to read. A new starter, however capable, hasn’t had time to build that yet. Skills for Care and immigration-sector commentary have both noted that internationally recruited care staff tend to have lower turnover than domestically recruited staff, which points toward a workforce that, in aggregate, may be carrying a higher proportion of newer starters than it was two years ago, though no source quantifies this precisely for domiciliary care alone.
This is a reasonable question for a registered manager to sit with, not a settled finding to repeat as fact. But it’s exactly the kind of question a lone worker duty of care is supposed to prompt.
What this means for onboarding, not just hiring
If the honest answer is “we don’t yet know how this affects visit safety,” the practical response is to stop treating personal safety as something staff pick up with experience over time, and start building it into onboarding from day one, the same way medication competency or moving and handling training already are.
That means every new starter, regardless of how long they’ve been in the role, should have the same safety net an experienced colleague has: a way to raise an alarm that doesn’t mean opening an app and finding a login screen while something’s going wrong in front of them, a check-in process that escalates on its own if something’s wrong rather than relying on someone remembering to call the office, and a way to log a concerning visit properly rather than mentioning it in passing at the end of a shift. This is the same gap our community healthcare lone working policy guide covers for NHS outreach staff, and it applies just as directly here.
How The Sentry helps
The Sentry gives every worker, new or experienced, the same lone worker compliance from their first solo visit. There’s no opening the app and no login screen to navigate: the alarm sits as a widget directly on the phone’s home screen, so once the phone is unlocked, a single touch raises it, which matters most for a newer starter who hasn’t yet built the instinct for when to reach for it, because it removes the need to think through several steps under pressure.
Every panic alarm records video throughout; the silent version also records audio, giving a genuine account of what happened on a visit that a new starter might otherwise struggle to describe clearly afterwards. The check-in timer runs on its own, with automatic escalation to the worker’s nominated contacts if a check-in is missed, rather than depending on a new colleague knowing when or how to flag a problem. And the incident reporting tool lets a worker log a concerning visit properly, by typing or dictating notes on the spot, with location, time and photos captured together, so nothing gets lost between the doorstep and the next handover.
None of this replaces good onboarding or local knowledge built over time. It means a new starter isn’t relying on experience they haven’t had the chance to build yet, while your business builds the wider duty of care record this sector increasingly needs to evidence. At £39.50 per user per year, with no hardware and deployment in under an hour, it’s a practical way to close this gap without a lengthy procurement process. Full detail on how it fits domiciliary care specifically is on The Sentry’s domiciliary care industry page.
If you’re reviewing how new starters are onboarded for lone visits, book a free demo to see how a check-in with automatic escalation and one-touch alarms work in practice.
Key dates to note
- 22 July 2025: new overseas sponsorship closed for Care Worker (SOC 6135) and Senior Care Worker (SOC 6136) roles.
- 22 July 2028: transitional arrangements end; these roles are removed from the Immigration Salary List and Temporary Shortage Occupation List after this date.
- November 2025: Skills for Care’s most recent “State of the Sector and Workforce” report, the source for the recruitment figures above.
FAQ
Did the Care Worker visa closure affect staff already working in the UK? No. It only closed new overseas applications from 22 July 2025. Anyone already sponsored under SOC 6135 or 6136 can extend their visa, switch employer, or apply for settlement until the transitional deadline of 22 July 2028.
Why has domiciliary care been more affected than other care settings? Domiciliary care has relied on international recruitment more heavily than many parts of adult social care, and Skills for Care’s November 2025 report recorded international recruitment across the sector falling from 105,000 to 50,000 in a single year, the same year the closure took effect.
Does a newer care worker face more risk on a lone visit than an experienced one? There’s no published UK research measuring this directly. What’s known is that newer starters haven’t had the same time to build local knowledge and judgement that experienced staff draw on, which is a reasonable basis for reviewing onboarding, not a proven safety gap.
What should registered managers actually change? Build personal safety into induction explicitly, rather than assuming it’s picked up with experience, and make sure every new starter has the same automatic check-in, alarm and reporting tools as long-serving colleagues from their very first solo visit.
Is this a temporary pressure while the transition period runs, or a lasting change? The transition runs to 2028, but it reflects a stated government policy direction toward domestic recruitment in the 2025 Immigration White Paper, so providers should plan for this as the sector’s ongoing reality rather than a short-term staffing blip.
This article was written by Stuart Evans, co-founder of The Sentry.