In the last five editions we have covered the NI hike, the international recruitment ban, the employment rights changes, agency cost premiums, onboarding failures, and why your job ad is probably the least important part of your hiring process.
This edition is a bit different. We are going to talk money. Specifically, the money that is leaking out of care businesses right now without anyone doing the sums properly, and a couple of tools that exist to help you work out exactly what it is costing you before you decide what to do about it.
The Fair Pay Agreement: where things actually stand
The Fair Pay Agreement consultation closed in January 2026. Secondary legislation establishing the Adult Social Care Negotiating Body is due to follow in October 2026. The negotiating body will then begin its first round of talks in autumn 2027, with the first agreement expected to take effect in April 2028.
So if you were hoping the FPA would fix your recruitment and retention problems this year, it won’t. That is nearly two years away at best. And the Nuffield Trust has already flagged that a sector-wide minimum wage policy, on its own, is unlikely to differentiate care work from the wider labour market enough to close the gap with NHS pay or retail.
What the FPA will do, eventually, is raise the floor for everyone. Which means providers who are currently paying above the floor to attract and retain staff may lose that competitive advantage when the floor rises around them. Worth thinking about now rather than in 2028.
The Fair Pay Agreement is coming. It is not coming soon. And when it does, the providers who will benefit most are the ones who have already built strong retention systems, because they will not need to scramble to make pay the only reason people stay.
The Baroness Casey commission: phase one is due
Baroness Casey’s Independent Commission into Adult Social Care is due to publish its first phase report in 2026. Phase one is focused on making the most of existing resources rather than proposing new funding, which tells you something about the government’s expectations before phase two begins.
The spending review in June 2025 made available up to £4 billion more for adult social care by 2028/29. Sector bodies were quick to point out that the Health Foundation estimates simply keeping pace with demand requires £3.4 billion by 2028/29. Meaning the headroom for actual improvement, better pay, better systems, reform, is extremely thin.
The practical message for providers: government is not going to solve the workforce crisis for you in the short term. The commission’s phase one recommendations will focus on efficiency and making existing resources go further. Which is consultant language for ‘we know the money isn’t there, so let’s look at what you can change without it.’
£34.5bn total adult social care expenditure in 2024/25, up 7.9% in cash terms. King’s Fund, April 2026.
LGA health check 2026: workload pressure is not improving
The LGA’s 2026 Adult Social Care Employer Standards Health Check found that more than half of adult social workers are experiencing rising workload pressures. Nearly half of non-registered care workers surveyed said they frequently experience excessive pressure in their roles.
Three years in a row. The same findings. The same pressures. The same call for more funding.
For care owners and managers reading this: workload pressure is a recruitment problem, a retention problem, and a quality of care problem all wrapped into one. Staff who feel overwhelmed leave. Staff who are close to leaving do not perform at their best. And managers who are too stretched to supervise properly create compliance risk. The numbers confirm what you already know from lived experience.
Most care providers don’t know what their recruitment is actually costing them
This is the one that comes up in almost every conversation I have with care managers and owners.
Not ‘we know it’s expensive but we can’t do much about it.’ More: ‘we genuinely haven’t sat down and worked out the full number.’
And that matters. Because you cannot make a case for investing in a better system if you do not know what the broken one is costing you. You cannot prioritise fixing retention over filling vacancies if you have not costed what replacing a leaver actually involves. And you cannot justify spending £400 a month on an ATS if you do not know you are currently spending £2,000 a month on agency shifts that a working pipeline would eliminate.
Here is what the full cost of a poor recruitment process typically includes:
- Job board spend per vacancy, often £200 to £500 per posting.
- Manager time spent screening, interviewing, scheduling and chasing, often 8 to 10 hours per vacancy at registered manager salary rates.
- Agency cover during the gap, often £12.50 to £22 per hour versus £11.50 to £14.50 directly employed.
- Onboarding and training costs for the new starter, Skills for Care estimates approximately £884 per new hire.
- The cost of a leaver within 90 days, where all of the above repeats immediately.
Add those up for one role. Then multiply by the number of roles you fill in a year.
The JRF’s most recent data puts the median total replacement cost per care worker at £3,683. Add recruitment and training and you are past £5,000 per leaver. For a provider replacing 10 people a year, not unusual for a service of 30 to 40 staff, that is £50,000 or more, year after year, with no system in place to reduce it.
Most care providers have never written that number down. Which is exactly why it keeps happening.
Two tools that exist to help you work out the number
The FMC cost calculator
The cost calculator on fittonmillett.com exists for one reason: to show you what your recruitment is actually costing your service, in pounds, before you decide what to do about it.
It takes inputs most care managers already know, your vacancy rate, your average agency spend per shift, how many roles you fill per year, your approximate time-to-hire, and turns them into a total annual cost figure broken down by category.
It is not a sales tool. It is an honest calculation. Some people run it and realise the number is lower than they thought. Most realise it is significantly higher. Either way, you leave knowing the actual cost rather than a guess.
One provider who ran the calculator before our first call came in with a figure of £67,000 per year in combined recruitment costs, agency premium and early leaver replacement. They had been operating with a vague sense it was ‘probably around £30k.’ The calculator did not create that problem. It just made it visible.
The Health Check and Blueprint self-audit
The Health Check and Blueprint is a structured self-audit for care providers who want to understand where their recruitment and retention process is working and where it is leaking.
It covers the four stages of the C.E.R.T framework, Create, Expand, Retain, Train, and produces a scored output that shows you which areas are functioning, which are partially in place, and which are effectively absent.
At £197, it is the cheapest honest assessment of your hiring process you will find. Not because it cuts corners. Because it is designed to be completed by the manager or owner directly, using your own data about your own service, which means the output is specific to you, not a generic report that could apply to any provider in the country.
Providers who have completed it typically come out with three to five clear priority actions, ranked by impact. Some implement them independently. Some use it as the basis for a discovery call with FMC. Either is fine. The audit stands alone.
What it consistently surfaces:
- Application processes that are too long or too vague, filtering out good candidates before interview.
- No structured onboarding beyond induction paperwork.
- No 90-day check-in process, meaning early attrition goes undetected until a resignation letter arrives.
- Job board spend spread across multiple platforms with no data on which produces hires that stay.
- No warm candidate pipeline, meaning every vacancy starts from zero.
If any of those sound familiar, they probably appear in your audit too.
One thing you can do this week
Run the numbers on your last quarter.
Before you do anything else, pull the following from the last three months:
- Total agency spend, every invoice, every service.
- Number of roles filled, directly employed, not agency.
- Number of leavers within 90 days of starting.
- Current open vacancies and how long each has been open.
Four data points. Most care managers can get these in under an hour.
Once you have them, plug them into the cost calculator. The output will tell you the annualised cost of your current position across recruitment spend, agency premium, and early leaver replacement.
If the number is lower than you expected, great, you are in a better position than many. If it is higher, you now have a specific, costed case for doing something different. Either is a better place to be than ‘we think it’s probably quite a lot.’
“It is little wonder the sector faces a recruitment and retention crisis with over 100,000 posts left vacant. Improving wages and workplace rights in social care are crucial to bolstering the sector’s workforce.” — RCN Director of Policy, February 2026