Care Voices: New Collaboration Launches to Champion Adult Social and Health Care Workers as Sector Faces Deepening Crisis
The Care Workers’ Charity (The CWC) and Providers Unite have today launched Care Voices, a national platform designed to strengthen communication, community, and collective advocacy across the social and health care workforce. By bringing together care workers, people who draw on care and providers, Care Voices creates a shared space where experiences can be heard, barriers reduced and solutions shaped collaboratively.
Care Voices has been established to bring together those who deliver care, strengthen sector-wide dialogue, and create a platform where evidence, lived experience and shared solutions meaningfully inform national decision-making. By ensuring the realities and human impact of care work are clearly heard, it seeks to influence policy in a credible, constructive, and united way.
The platform’s first campaign will focus on internationally recruited care workers, who are facing disproportionate and escalating pressures. However, Care Voices is intentionally designed to evolve. As it grows, it will address a broader range of workforce challenges, including the implementation of the Fair Pay Agreement, changes under the Employment Rights Bill, structural inequalities, progression pathways, safe clinical delegation, and ongoing funding instability. Its purpose is clear: to dismantle barriers, share best practice, and strengthen collective advocacy across both social and health care, ensuring the workforce is valued, protected, and represented in the decisions that shape the sector’s future.
International recruits are experiencing unprecedented insecurity. Around 385,000 migrant workers now support adult social care, and over 80% of workforce growth since 2021 has relied on overseas recruitment (Skills for Care). Yet policy direction is moving sharply against them. The Home Office’s proposal to impose a 15-year settlement route for care workers, now the harshest pathway for any UK working group, follows the dependants ban introduced earlier this year. These rapid, targeted changes intensify risks for a workforce already facing exploitation and financial instability. ADASS’ Autumn 2025 Survey Report warns that restricting international recruitment is destabilising adult social care, undermining provider stability, worsening unmet need and delaying hospital discharges. These reforms deepen an already critical workforce crisis.
Meanwhile, adult social care continues to be overlooked in national budgets and policymaking. The pressures remain stark: 111,000 vacancies, a £77.8 billion annual economic contribution, and turnover nearing 25%. These challenges affect the entire system, from community support to NHS flow and national productivity. Care Voices has been created to ensure these realities can no longer be ignored.
Care Voices will amplify frontline voices through responsive, real-time surveys and by providing a safe, supportive space for workers to share concerns without fear. This ensures those most affected by instability are heard quickly, clearly, and consistently. It will help share positive practice, build dignity into everyday culture, and present a unified, human-centred evidence base for policymakers.
In a sector that has long lacked a national mechanism for listening to care workers, Care Voices represents a meaningful and long-overdue step forward.
Karolina Gerlich, CEO of The Care Workers’ Charity, said:
“We are launching Care Voices because the social and health care workforce needs a national platform that genuinely listens, understands, and responds to their lived experience. Our first campaign focus on internationally recruited care workers is vital: no other part of the workforce has faced such rapid, disproportionate, and destabilising policy changes. But this initiative is about far more than one group. When any section of the workforce is undermined, the whole care system becomes less stable, less safe, and less fair. Care Voices will ensure that those delivering care every day finally have a collective space to speak, be heard and influence the policies that shape their work, their lives, and the quality-of-care people receive.”
Katrina Hall, Project Lead of Providers Unite, said: “Care Voices gives care workers something they have needed for an exceptionally long time; a place where they can speak freely, without fear, and know that what they say will genuinely shape change. Too often, care workers have been expected to carry impossible pressures silently or speak only through others. Care Voices shifts that dynamic. It brings care workers together as a united community, holding space for honesty, solidarity, and shared experience. It recognises that behind every policy issue, real people are doing emotionally demanding work every single day. Providers Unite is proud to stand behind Care Voices because we believe the sector is strongest when care workers feel protected, valued, and empowered. When their voices lead the conversation, the whole care system benefits.”
Care Voices represents a vital step in defending the workforce that underpins the entire care system, ensuring they are visible, valued, protected, and empowered.