By Jonathan Gardner, Chief Executive Officer of Bluebird Care
As I look back on 2025, what stands out most is not a single policy decision or headline statistic, but the day-to-day reality of delivering care in an increasingly pressured system. This has been a year where every provider has had to think more carefully about sustainability, workforce wellbeing and the changing expectations of the people we support.
There’s no denying that our sector has been operating under extraordinary cost pressure, which hit new heights in 2025. Payroll costs rose by around 12% across the sector, local authority uplifts once again fell far short of covering real costs, and workforce shortages remained stubbornly high at 130,000 current vacancies in social care. None of us are strangers to these challenges, but this year they felt more acute, particularly as the promise of wider reform slipped down the government’s priority list.
And yet, in the middle of these pressures, I’ve seen a quiet, determined commitment from our teams and indeed from homecare providers across the sector to adapt with professionalism.
Responding to Pressure in 2025
2025 has been about adapting and innovating to meet rising demand and focus on what matters most to people seeking care and support at home. Across our 220 franchise businesses, we’re now delivering more than a million hours of care per month in 2025 – a 15% increase from 2024. I’ve been immensely proud of the work our teams have done this year at Bluebird Care to develop more complex care services (doubling our number of complex care customers), expand live-in services, and make use of tools that help families access support more quickly.
We know that people want choice, and there is a significant growing demand for high-quality care at home, which we are proud to step up to. This year, we launched our new brand and strapline ‘It’s Good To be Home’, which encapsulates our premium offer and the importance of home and memories as people age. Our new premium look and feel clearly has a place in people’s expectations and preferences for homecare, as we have been pleased to see a 60% growth in leads quarter-to-quarter as a result.
We have accompanied the new brand with training that makes sure our Care Professionals and support teams are equipped to deliver the care that meets the changing needs of today. Over 250 Care Professionals have now attended our bespoke enhanced dementia training, developed to be role-specific and an extension of our Alzheimer’s Society Dementia Friends programme. On top of that, we’re setting our 10,000+ Care Professionals up for the future of care delivery with our in-house Bluebird Care Academy, which was accredited as a registered training provider this year – reducing the administrative and time burden for Care Professionals by giving them all the qualifications they need to advance their careers under one roof.
These investments in our premium offer and highly skilled colleague training reflects the changing face of care, which is about raising standards and bringing to communities a full-service offer that can be there for people as their needs change.
Looking Ahead to the New Year
As we step into 2026, I’m hopeful – not because the pressures facing social care will ease – but because I’ve seen what our workforce and our network can achieve when we work together in new ways. A key part of this will be continuing to embrace digital innovation as a driver of efficiency, adaptation and transformation in the face of ongoing sector headwinds.
In 2025, Bluebird Care took significant strides in this space, with major advancements in AI-enabled tools through integrating PairlyPro, HubSpot and Tribepad into different areas of our practice. These technologies are already helping our teams work more efficiently, match customers to the right services more quickly, and streamline recruitment and marketing in ways that were not possible even a few years ago.
Looking ahead, we will continue to build on these foundations, using intelligent digital tools to strengthen operational resilience, improve customer experience and free up more time for what matters most: delivering exceptional care.
Adapting to Policy Changes in 2026 and Beyond
The national policy landscape is evolving slowly, and 2026 will see some major milestones start to take shape that will create more change for providers. The Employment Rights Bill seeks to improve professionalisation across parts of our sector, and the groundwork for the Fair Pay Agreement will start to emerge ahead of its 2028 planned implementation. These are important changes, but they will also bring new expectations, new reporting requirements and, of course, yet more new cost implications for employers.
Providers of all shapes and sizes need to be ready, informed and involved, to make sure that the lived reality of homecare is reflected in the path ahead. Of course, we also want to see reforms being matched by commissioning models and funding structures that allow these changes to be introduced responsibly.
But rather than sit back and hope for more sector funding to magically emerge, we need to start work now to understand our data, scenario-plan and continue building operational resilience. We’re supporting our franchise partners to carry out this work because we recognise that as a sector, we can’t afford to wait for policy reform to happen to us.
What remains certain is our unwavering commitment to high quality care and the commitment of the Care Professionals and franchise partners within Bluebird Care.
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