Rejected over one sentence in a contract
Spire Homecare's first sponsor licence application was handled by an immigration advice firm, and it ran the way these things used to run: no portal, no checklist, just attachments emailed to a caseworker over six to eight weeks. “It was in the dark,” says Luke Donohue, Spire Homecare's CEO. “You get no feeling of it being complete.”
The Home Office found what their immigration advice firm hadn't: a leftover line in a contract template, two paragraphs below a stated guarantee of 40 hours a week, saying hours were not guaranteed. The application, which they paid the firm £3,000 for, was rejected, and the cooling-off period that followed locked Spire Homecare out of reapplying for 12 months.
“It's a bit of a kick in the stomach. You can't help but already plan for the people who are desperate to work for us, and you have to turn around and say: really sorry, we have to try again in 12 months. You feel guilt, because you want to help people and your hands are tied.”
The people waiting weren't abstract. Spire Homecare employed carers on 20-hour visas, sponsored elsewhere, who wanted full-time work with a company they already knew. For a year, the answer had to be not yet.
One sentence in a template cost Spire Homecare twelve months. The second attempt took three weeks.
The difference was what happened during the wait. A neighbouring care provider already on Borderless sat Luke down and showed him the platform, and what struck him wasn't the tidiness of it, but what it would make possible later. “It works on scale,” he says, “which is exactly what we're aiming for over the next five years.” Luke spent the cooling-off period on Borderless's free workshops and webinars, and had the second application lined up for the first day Spire Homecare was eligible.
Granted in three weeks, with ten certificates
The application went in through the Borderless portal this time: a list of what's needed, documents uploaded against it, and a system that flags what it doesn't like before anything goes near the Home Office. The step that sank the first application, checking what's actually in the paperwork, now happens by default.
The licence came back granted in two to three weeks on the priority service, with ten Certificates of Sponsorship. Luke emailed Spire Homecare's first sponsored hire the day the decision arrived: a senior carer, then working elsewhere, who is still with the company today. Then the team deliberately slowed down: sponsor one person, learn the process end to end, and only then scale.
“Before, it was just emails back and forth, and you get no feeling of it being complete. With Borderless you upload the documents, you go down the list and you go: great, I've done that.”
Twenty-five carers, by design
Eighteen months on, Spire Homecare sponsors 25 carers: 12% of a workforce of more than 200, delivering a consistently high share of Spire Homecare's 4,500 weekly care hours, and that percentage is deliberate. Luke puts the sector's average dependence far higher, and Spire Homecare has watched providers nearby grow on the back of a licence, fall behind on the records a sponsor has a duty to keep, and lose everything when it was suspended.
Losing the licence wouldn't close Spire Homecare, Luke believes, but it would take 6 to 9 months to recover: workers facing the loss of their CoS, customers at risk, local authorities to inform, rosters that never run with slack. So the team forecasts its CoS allocation each year against the recruitment it can already see coming, rather than finding itself waiting on an allocation increase when it can least afford to.
“Without Borderless, I'm not entirely sure we would have been able to keep hold of the licence with the personnel we had at the time. It's led to 25 workers being sponsored, and it has impacted our growth substantially.”
Ten applications in two hours
Day to day, the platform asks little. Hayley Gosney, Spire Homecare's Recruitment Manager, uploads documents when a new carer joins and payslips on a monthly cycle, and otherwise waits to be told. A new starter's compliance score reaches 100% within a couple of days, as fast as the carer can send over their share code and address history. “When we get them all up to 100%, that's a celebration,” she says.
The score works in both directions. Carers with questions about their own sponsorship can be shown their file: everything present, 100%, nothing missing.
The licence health score, Borderless's measure of how audit-ready the licence is as a whole, was 60% when first measured in March 2026 and 86% by August, with 335 worker documents held on the platform. Each carer also carries their own compliance score, a separate per-person measure of how complete their records are; the average across all 25 is 94.4%. Every visa application Spire Homecare has made has been granted.
“It's not just peace of mind for us. We can give the workforce that peace of mind as well.”
The real test came with an acquisition, agreed in December 2025 and worked through that February: a provider whose sponsorship had been run on a spreadsheet and the SMS alone, with 18 of its 22 staff on certificates, and whose licence was revoked. 18 sponsored workers were suddenly without a sponsor, and re-sponsoring them quickly was the difference between buying a business and buying a client list.
“It took me maybe two hours to get all ten CoS applications in. They all came back approved within three weeks. That kept the team going. Without it, we would have run out of time.”
That changed what the next deal looks like. In care, acquisitions come with sponsored workforces attached, and whether a target's workers can be kept is close to whether the deal is worth doing. “I feel comfortable to come to Borderless and say: we're preparing for this acquisition, what are we going to need? Do we apply for more certificates now?” The licence has stopped being a compliance obligation and become part of how Spire Homecare buys.
The kind of sponsor worth working for
Ask the team why any of this matters and the answer isn't administrative. Gemma Izod, Spire Homecare's Operations Manager, has lost count of the carers she's met who are sponsored elsewhere and treated as if they're owned: short of their contracted hours, kept in the dark about their own pay, begging a second employer not to contact their sponsor for a reference.
“They don't want to make a fuss, because they don't want to lose their visa and be out of a job. They're trapped in where they are, and it's not a nice place to be.”
Spire Homecare set out to prove the opposite was possible: guaranteed hours honoured, open conversations about pay, and development plans that treat a sponsored carer as a future senior or manager rather than a filled shift. The platform plays its part perfectly, because a worker whose file reads 100% has one less thing to be frightened about.
The five-year plan is scale, and the licence is now part of the machinery rather than a risk on the register: an allocation forecast against the hiring Spire Homecare can see coming, settled-status transitions planned for rather than feared, and the next acquisition scoped with Borderless in the room before the ink dries.
“Knowledge and support is power. Pay for the right support and the right system, so you can be assured you're doing everything you should be.”