“A staff passport for Care” a conversation with Will Merch, Head of Commercial Growth at Borderless

Care Ecosystem Podcast, Episode 5: Will Merch, Head of Commercial Growth at Borderless (an immigration platform for the care sector), joins Nourish's Denise Tack and Lee Gilbert to unpack a side of workforce planning that rarely gets airtime: sponsor license compliance. Sponsor license revocations are up roughly 10x since 2020, and Will explains why adult social care bears the brunt because it holds the most sponsor licenses and its payroll and rostering complexity make compliance genuinely hard to get right. The conversation covers real, sobering stakes (a rural provider losing 75% of its staff over a single hour's payroll discrepancy; a chief exec discovering two of their staff were victims of human trafficking rather than a visa breach), alongside a forward-looking idea for a portable "staff passport," and closes with warmer stories about the genuine, positive impact international recruitment has had on care delivery and culture in UK care homes.