Two questions that sound like one question
For domiciliary care teams, Skills for Care’s most recent workforce report shows vacancies falling and the sector growing. That’s genuinely good news, and worth taking seriously. But “is the workforce recovering” and “is home care getting safer” are two different questions, and only one of them has any data behind it. If you’re a registered manager reading the headline figures and feeling reassured about staff safety on the strength of them, it’s worth pausing on that, because nothing in this report, or any other UK dataset, actually measures the second question.
What the report actually shows
Skills for Care’s “The state of the adult social care sector and workforce in England, 2025” report, published in November 2025, recorded genuine recovery signals: vacancy rates across adult social care returned to around 7%, the workforce grew, and the proportion of men in care roles reached a new high. Within CQC-regulated non-residential (domiciliary) services specifically, the vacancy rate fell to 9.9% in 2024/25 from 11.7% the year before.
The Health Foundation’s own response to the report is a useful check on how far to read into that. Its Director of Policy and Research called the improvement “fragile,” pointing out that vacancy rates remain roughly three times higher than the wider economy, that the recovery has been driven largely by international recruitment now closed to new applicants, and that most employers still don’t offer enhanced sick pay or pension contributions above the legal minimum. The care worker visa closure adds another question about who makes solo visits. None of that is a safety statistic either. It’s a workforce stability statistic, and a reasonably cautious one at that.
What “getting safer” would actually require
To know whether home visits are getting safer, you’d need a dataset that tracks incidents, specifically for domiciliary care, specifically over time. No such dataset exists in the UK.
What does exist: the Crime Survey for England and Wales estimates around 689,000 incidents of work-related violence a year across all employment in England and Wales, and separately records health and social care as a higher-risk occupational category than average. But that figure blends hospitals, care homes, GP settings and community healthcare visits with domiciliary visits into one category, so it can’t tell you whether the specific risk of a solo home visit is rising, falling, or flat. RIDDOR, the other main HSE data source, only captures the most serious injuries requiring medical attention or time off work, and research linked to the Violence and Aggression Research Network (a University of Manchester and HSE collaboration) has been reported as finding that RIDDOR consistently undercounts real incidents by a factor of five to ten compared with survey-based estimates, because so much workplace violence, particularly verbal abuse, goes unreported. Skills and Employment Survey 2024 puts caring and service occupations at roughly three in ten workers experiencing workplace abuse annually, but that’s a single snapshot, not a trend, and it isn’t domiciliary-care-specific either.
Put plainly: the workforce numbers are tracked meticulously, every year, down to the individual sector. The safety numbers, for this specific sector and this specific type of lone visit, simply aren’t tracked anywhere at that level of detail.
Why this gap matters for a registered manager
A national recruitment story, however encouraging, tells you nothing about whether your own workers are safer on their rounds this year than last year. It can’t, because nobody has built the dataset that would let it. That’s not a criticism of Skills for Care, whose report does exactly what it sets out to do; it’s a genuine limitation in what’s available to any provider trying to answer a safety question with sector-level evidence. If something changes for the worse this year, whether that’s a rise in aggressive incidents, a change in client acuity, or simply less experienced staff attending more visits, there’s no national early warning system that will tell a registered manager that before it shows up in their own agency’s numbers.
What providers can actually do about it
The honest answer is that a provider’s own incident data is the only safety dataset that will ever exist for their own operation. Waiting for a national picture that doesn’t exist, and may never exist at the level of detail a single agency needs, means waiting indefinitely. The alternative is building that visibility locally: recording every concerning visit properly, consistently, and in enough detail that patterns become visible over time, rather than relying on individual memory or a comment in passing at handover. This also gives managers evidence for their lone worker compliance obligations.
How The Sentry helps
The Sentry’s incident reporting tool lets a worker log a concerning visit on the spot, by typing or dictating notes, with location, time and photos captured together. Every panic alarm activation is also recorded as a geo-stamped, time-stamped entry in the management portal, alongside the video (and, for the silent alarm, audio) captured during the incident itself. A simple check-in at a visit is logged the same way, as a geo-stamped, time-stamped entry, and for a longer check-in the worker’s journey is tracked on the same portal map, with their location updating every 30 seconds throughout. Together, this builds exactly the kind of provable audit trail that no national report can offer, and the kind of evidence that genuine lone worker compliance depends on: your own agency’s own record of what’s actually happening on your own visits, over time.
This won’t replace the national data gap, and it doesn’t need to. What it gives a registered manager is something more useful for their own duty of care: real visibility into their own trends, built from their own visits, rather than an assumption borrowed from a workforce report that was never designed to answer a safety question in the first place. Full detail on how this fits domiciliary care is on The Sentry’s domiciliary care industry page.
If you want to see how incident tracking and evidence work in practice, book a free demo to see The Sentry’s reporting and activity log for yourself.
Key facts to note
- Skills for Care’s November 2025 report recorded a 9.9% vacancy rate in CQC-regulated non-residential (domiciliary) services for 2024/25, down from 11.7% the previous year.
- The Crime Survey for England and Wales figures on workplace violence are UK-wide and cross-sector; they don’t break out domiciliary care specifically or track it as a year-on-year trend.
- Research linked to the Violence and Aggression Research Network has been reported as finding that RIDDOR data undercounts real workplace violence incidents by roughly five to ten times compared with survey-based estimates.
FAQ
Does Skills for Care’s report tell us whether home care visits are getting safer? No. It tracks workforce metrics like vacancies, turnover and pay. No UK dataset currently tracks incident or safety trends specifically for domiciliary care visits over time.
Is there any data at all on violence against home care workers? There’s a single snapshot figure from the Skills and Employment Survey 2024 (around three in ten caring and service workers report abuse annually), and broader cross-sector figures from the Crime Survey for England and Wales, but nothing that tracks trends specifically for domiciliary care visits year on year.
Why doesn’t RIDDOR data answer this question? RIDDOR only captures the most serious injuries requiring medical attention or significant time off work. Research linked to the Violence and Aggression Research Network has been reported as finding it undercounts real incidents by five to ten times, because most workplace violence, especially verbal abuse, is never formally reported.
If the national data doesn’t exist, what should a registered manager do? Build visibility at the agency level instead of waiting for a national dataset that doesn’t exist. Consistent, detailed incident recording over time is the only safety evidence base any individual provider will actually have.
Does falling vacancy rates mean visits are becoming safer in practice? Not necessarily, and there’s no data confirming it either way. A recovering workforce and a safer workforce are different claims, and only the first one has been measured.
This article was written by Stuart Evans, co-founder of The Sentry.