The sector we forget about – until we need it
The care sector is the UK’s biggest employer, with demand forecast to rise 27% over the next 15 years. Yet most of us – myself included – forget it exists until a loved one needs it.
When my granny suddenly went into care, I quickly realised how much the people in care matter: from having enough of the right staff on shift, to the manager checking in with families and making sure everything runs smoothly for residents. The quality of care is, almost entirely, the quality of the people delivering it.
Now, just three months into working with care providers, I’ve realised that despite being the country’s largest employer, the sector faces more unsolved challenges than almost any other.
Challenges that no other industry would tolerate
Care leaders are being asked to do something genuinely hard:
- Attract staff into high-pressure, often low-paid roles, in a labour market where every other sector is competing for the same people
- Pull together far more documentation per hire than most other roles require – DBS checks, right-to-work evidence, employment history with no gaps, references, health declarations, training certificates – often under urgent time pressure because a rota gap means a real person doesn’t get their care visit
- Report compliance to both the Home Office and CQC, using processes that are still largely paper-based and technology that lags well behind other industries
The cost of getting any of this wrong is severe. Right-to-work errors can attract fines of £60,000 or more per breach. Sponsor licence revocation doesn’t just hurt one hire – it shuts down an entire workforce pipeline overnight. Over 470 care sector sponsor licences have been revoked in the past 18 months alone, displacing roughly 40,000 care workers and wiping out an estimated 78 million hours of care that vulnerable people are now not receiving.
And underneath all of this sits a workforce maths problem the country has barely begun to confront: care home bed supply has grown by under 3% over the last decade, while the over-65 population has grown by more than 20%. By 2050, England faces a projected shortfall of around 200,000 care home beds. New capacity means nothing if there is no one to staff it.
A leaky funnel followed by a leaky bucket
Recruitment in care today is, candidly, a leaky funnel followed by a leaky bucket. Providers spend significant sums screening candidates pre-interview, only to face interview no-show rates that would be considered a crisis in any other industry. The candidates who do show, and do get hired, then enter an onboarding process that typically takes 6–8 weeks of manual chasing – references, DBS, contracts, GDPR forms, health checks – during which a meaningful proportion drop out, take other offers, or simply lose momentum. Most providers I speak to cannot tell me their cost per hire, let alone their fully loaded cost to replace a leaver. The information simply isn’t visible.
But all is not lost. Rarely have I spoken to a more engaged group of people than care leaders. They are genuinely motivated to fix the recruitment and retention crisis – and, true to the name of their sector, they really do care.
Why AI feels different this time
The care sector has heard “technology will save us” before, and is rightly sceptical. So why does this wave feel different?
Because, for the first time, AI can do the genuinely human-shaped parts of recruitment admin: reading documents, chasing people, summarising conversations, spotting anomalies, and explaining what’s missing in plain English. It is not replacing the judgement of a registered manager – it is removing the hours of low-value paperwork that currently prevent that manager from being on the floor.
In practice, four shifts are starting to land in care:
- Intelligent matching. AI can match candidates to a provider’s specific needs – location, shift patterns, experience, driving licence, values – rather than relying on a CV pile and a gut call.
- Automated compliance. Worker files can be reviewed against Home Office requirements continuously, not annually. Issues are flagged and the workers themselves are chased to upload missing documents, rather than a manager doing it manually at 9pm.
- Frictionless onboarding. Self-service onboarding, with AI checking documents as they arrive, is collapsing 6–8 week processes into roughly two. Half the time, half the cost, and a candidate experience that doesn’t haemorrhage people between offer and start date.
- Predictive retention and audit-readiness. Real-time dashboards mean providers know they are non-compliant before the Home Office does – and can intervene before a resignation, a visa expiry, or a missed renewal becomes a crisis.
People remain the point
None of this replaces care workers, registered managers, or the human relationships that make a care service good. The opposite, in fact. AI is starting to build the infrastructure underneath the sector faster than any of us could on our own – so that scarce, precious people resources can be spent where they matter most: on care, which only runs well when there are great people behind it.
The sector’s expansion strategy, in the end, is its talent strategy. AI is what makes that strategy executable at scale.
Emma Donaldson
Commercial Director, Lifted
