The impact of UK immigration policy shifts on Labour supply chains: A case study of independent adult social care providers

Since April 2024, the United Kingdom's "New Plan for Immigration" has raised the general Skilled Worker salary threshold and prohibited overseas care workers from sponsoring dependants, intensifying recruitment pressure on a sector already reporting approximately 152,000 vacancies (Migration Advisory Committee [MAC], 2023). Independent adult social care providers, most of which are small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs), must absorb these escalating compliance costs while remaining bound by fixed Local Authority commissioning rates, producing acute liquidity and workforce-continuity risks.
Existing literature offers extensive macro-level analysis of post-Brexit labour market adjustment (Sumption, 2022) and long-standing sociological accounts of the "global care drain" (Yeates, 2009), yet little empirical work examines how independent providers translate these regulatory shocks into firm-level strategic responses in the specific post-2024 high-threshold era. This study addresses that gap by applying a Resource-Based View (RBV) lens to the micro-level survival strategies of independent care SMEs.
Using a pragmatic, convergent mixed-methods design, this research surveyed 50 independent UK care providers and conducted 10 semi-structured interviews with care home managers to map what is termed the "compliance cost gap": the fiscal shortfall between visa-mandated wage floors and static Local Authority reimbursement rates. Findings show a marked post-policy increase in cost-per-hire, vacancy rates and agency staffing reliance, alongside qualitative evidence of eroded continuity of care and managerial burnout. Providers who diversified recruitment and invested in digital process automation demonstrated significantly greater operational resilience than those reliant solely on international sponsorship. The study's principal contribution is the Strategic Adaptation Model (SAM), a three-pillar, practitioner-oriented framework; domestic pipeline diversification, digital optimisation, and financial risk management; that offers care providers, sector bodies and policymakers an empirically grounded toolkit for sustaining essential social infrastructure amid volatile immigration policy.