Staff turnover down 63%
In 2021, at the height of the Great Resignation, National Care Group's staff turnover reached 41%. For most businesses that would be a hiring problem, but NCG supports working-age adults with learning disabilities, autism, mental health needs and brain injuries, people for whom a familiar face is part of the care itself.
The hiring pool made it harder, because working-age adult social care is barely known even to people who know care: say 'adult social care' and most people picture elderly care homes. Many of NCG's services sit in locations that are difficult to recruit for, and the domestic pool in this corner of the sector is small.
“Some colleagues work really well with particular individuals, and they will be expecting to see that support worker the next day. If something happens and an agency worker comes in, there's every chance that's going to be a challenging day, because you've broken that routine and expectation.”
When the Health and Care Worker visa opened the route, NCG didn't recruit abroad. Many of the people it needed were already in its services, working through agencies. So the group stood up its own sponsor licences, several of them, organised by region, and offered those colleagues a route in-house: three years sponsored, then a two-year renewal.
Those colleagues brought stability to the services that had been hardest to staff, and stability compounds: the same faces on the same rotas, supporting people whose day depends on knowing who is walking through the door.
“They are the beating heart of our organisation, and without them there is no National Care Group.”
Sponsorship on top of the day job
NCG built its sponsorship programme itself, learning as it went. As it grew, a sponsored colleague's records were spread across several systems, and legal questions went to lawyers who charged by the hour every time somebody picked up the phone.
That held while sponsorships arrived one at a time. Then the renewals started landing in blocks, and the CoS requests and renewals sat with a talent attraction team already running sponsorship on top of its day job.
“Rather than adding headcount and resource, I wanted something more scalable, that we could scale up or down depending on the workload, through a partnership.”
A recommendation from the sector
Borderless arrived through the peer networks where care leaders actually talk, first at a Care Leaders Network session and then through Care England. A law firm on retainer could have answered questions by the hour, but the records a sponsor has a duty to keep needed a system, not a phone number.
What she wanted was everything in one place: every sponsored colleague's record, the risk picture across all the licences, and immigration expertise sitting behind it that could flex with the workload rather than bill against it.
“Borderless has given us peace of mind, and the ability to report and have that global visibility of all of our sponsored colleagues.”
Everything in one place, and someone to ask
Every sponsored colleague now has one record on Borderless, and the platform reads it constantly: an out-of-date passport, a missing document, a compliance gap, flagged before anyone at the Home Office has reason to ask. Applications get the same scrutiny before they are submitted. Since NCG joined in April 2025, 183 visas have been granted through Borderless, a 98% approval rate, and every request for more CoS has been approved.
The money moved in the right direction too: more than £10,000 in Immigration Skills Charge refunds has been recovered and returned to NCG.
Staff turnover is the number the whole strategy reports into. It has fallen by 63%, from 41% at the height of the Great Resignation to 15% today, against an independent-sector average of 24.7%. That drop belongs to NCG's own strategy and the stability its sponsored colleagues bring to the hardest-to-staff services. Borderless's part is keeping that strategy running safely at 415 colleagues, without adding to the team.
“We would have been blissfully unaware. We would have found out we were missing documents at the point of being served a Home Office notice, and then we would have been scrambling.”
For the team, the biggest change is having somewhere to take a hard question. Before Borderless that meant a lawyer's clock or going it alone; now Nicola Fisher, NCG's Talent Attraction Manager, coordinates the whole sponsorship workload directly with Borderless. The split is simple: NCG sends through the details of each new hire or renewal, and Borderless prepares and reviews every CoS and visa application, flags anything missing and answers questions during core hours.
“Had we not partnered with Borderless, we would have hired two additional headcount into the talent attraction team to support the sponsorship workload. This has had a marked impact on us being able to scale without adding headcount.”
That was the road not taken: two more roles at around £60,000 a year plus employer's costs, doing by hand what the platform now carries. “Having a partnership and a relationship that was part of your business as usual, that just gave us a little bit more comfort around the whole process,” says Claire. It also took a lot of pressure off Nicola and her team.
Built for the long term
The regional structure has proved its worth. When a Home Office decision took one of NCG's regional licences out of action, the other regions carried on as normal and the licence was reinstated. Borderless then worked alongside the team to reapply for the CoS allocation that licence had lost, and that was restored too.
The care worker route has since closed to new overseas recruitment, so the plan has shifted from growing the number to keeping the people. NCG is extending visas so colleagues can reach five years and indefinite leave to remain, giving those who were sponsored the opportunity to be promoted into management roles, or other roles within the Group, that their visa would never have opened up to them. Those extensions run through Borderless too, with every renewal date in view across all the licences.
“You don't know what you don't know. To have support available during core hours is perfect, rather than waiting and then having to spend thousands of pounds on an immigration lawyer.”