It is 7pm on a Friday evening. A care home in Surrey has just been told that two of its night-shift staff are unable to come in — one is unwell, the other has a family emergency. The home has 34 residents, eight of whom have advanced dementia and require regular overnight monitoring.
The manager calls the staffing agency. Within an hour, two replacement workers are confirmed. They arrive at 9pm. The senior carer on duty signs them in, notes their names, and gives them a brief orientation. The night shift begins.
Nobody verified their identity at the door. Nobody confirmed their DBS status was current. Nobody checked their right to work in the UK. Nobody knows whether these two individuals have ever worked in a care setting before.
The care home trusts the agency sent the right people. The agency trusts its own paperwork is in order. Neither party verified anything at the point of arrival. And 34 vulnerable residents are now in the care of two people whose credentials exist only on a spreadsheet in an agency office somewhere.
This is not an unusual scenario. It is the default operating model across much of UK social care.
The scale of agency reliance
Adult social care in England employs approximately 1.5 million people, according to Skills for Care. Staff turnover in the sector runs at roughly 29%, with vacancy rates consistently above 9%. These figures have been elevated for years, and the gap between demand and supply shows no sign of closing.
To fill that gap, care homes rely heavily on agency and temporary workers. On any given night, thousands of agency staff are working in care homes across England, providing intimate, hands-on care to vulnerable adults. In some homes — particularly those in rural areas or those that have struggled to recruit permanently — agency staff may constitute 30-50% of the workforce on certain shifts.
The reliance is understandable. The alternative is operating below safe staffing levels, which carries its own regulatory and safeguarding risks. But the scale of agency usage creates a compliance problem that the sector has never properly resolved: when an agency worker arrives at a care home, who is responsible for verifying they are who the agency says they are?
The accountability gap
This is where the system breaks down. There are two parties in the relationship — the agency and the care home — and each has a reasonable but incomplete assumption about who does what.
The agency's position: "We recruited this worker. We checked their DBS. We verified their right to work. We confirmed their qualifications and references. Our records are in order. When we deploy them to your home, they are a vetted, compliant worker."
The care home's position: "The agency has a legal obligation to conduct pre-employment checks on its workers. We contract with the agency on the basis that those checks have been completed. We don't have the capacity to re-verify every agency worker who walks through the door, especially at short notice."
Both positions are understandable. Neither is complete.
The Care Quality Commission's position is unambiguous: the registered provider — the care home — bears ultimate responsibility for ensuring that everyone working in the home is fit to do so. CQC Regulation 19 (Fit and proper persons employed) applies to all staff, including those supplied by agencies.
This means that when a CQC inspector asks to see compliance records for agency staff, and the care home says "the agency has those records," the home has a problem. The fact that the agency conducted checks does not absolve the provider of responsibility for confirming that those checks were adequate and current.
What happens when it goes wrong
The consequences of the accountability gap are not theoretical.
In published CQC inspection reports, failures in agency staff verification are a recurring theme in homes rated "Requires Improvement" or "Inadequate." Common findings include:
- No records held at the home confirming agency workers' DBS status or right-to-work verification
- Expired DBS certificates for agency workers who had been deployed multiple times without updated checks
- Identity not confirmed on arrival — the home had no process for verifying that the person who showed up was the person the agency had vetted
- No competency records — agency workers deployed to dementia care or palliative care settings without evidence of relevant training or experience
The safeguarding implications are serious. According to published data, approximately 39% of safeguarding concerns in adult social care involve staff, volunteers, or professionals. When the staff in question are agency workers whose credentials have not been independently verified at the point of service, the risk compounds.
In the most serious cases, care homes have been placed in special measures or had their registration suspended following safeguarding incidents involving agency workers whose backgrounds were not adequately verified.
The subcontractor problem
The picture is further complicated by the structure of the staffing agency market. Many agencies subcontract to other agencies, creating a supply chain that can be two or three layers deep.
A care home contracts with Agency A. Agency A does not have an available worker, so it subcontracts to Agency B. Agency B deploys a worker from its books. The care home believes it is receiving a worker vetted by Agency A — the agency it has a contractual relationship with and whose compliance standards it has (in theory) assessed. In reality, the worker was vetted by Agency B, an organisation the care home has never heard of and whose standards it has never reviewed.
This is not an edge case. In a sector with high demand and fragmented supply, subcontracting is common. The care home at the end of the chain has no visibility into who actually conducted the checks on the person now caring for its residents.
What CQC actually expects
CQC's expectations, set out in its inspection framework, are clear:
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The provider must satisfy itself that agency workers have been subject to the same pre-employment checks as permanent staff — including identity verification, DBS disclosure at the appropriate level, right-to-work checks, and evidence of qualifications and competence
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Records must be accessible at the home. It is not sufficient to say "the agency holds those records." The provider needs its own evidence — whether copies of DBS certificates, confirmation letters from the agency, or access to a shared compliance system
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Checks must be current. A DBS certificate from three years ago does not provide assurance about an individual's current status. CQC expects providers to have systems for tracking when agency workers' checks were last updated
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Identity must be verified on arrival. A name on a shift sheet is not identity verification. CQC expects that the provider confirms the person who arrives is the person the agency said it was sending
The gap between these expectations and the operational reality in most care homes is significant.
The Fair Work Agency adds another layer
The Fair Work Agency, launched in April 2026, adds employment compliance enforcement to the picture. While CQC focuses on care quality and safety, the FWA focuses on employment law — including right-to-work checks, minimum wage compliance, and working time regulations.
For care homes relying on agency staff, this creates a dual enforcement exposure. CQC can take action for failures in safeguarding and staff suitability. The FWA can take action for failures in right-to-work verification, with penalties of up to £60,000 per illegal worker.
The FWA's walk-in audit powers mean that an employment compliance visit can happen without notice. If a visiting officer asks to see right-to-work documentation for agency staff currently on shift, and the care home cannot produce it, the penalty applies to the care home — not the agency.
Practical solutions that actually work
Fixing this problem does not require eliminating agency usage. That is not realistic given the sector's staffing challenges. It requires closing the verification gap between deployment and arrival.
1. Establish arrival verification as a non-negotiable process
Every agency worker who arrives for a shift should be verified before they begin providing care. This means confirming their identity against a photo ID, confirming their DBS status is current, and confirming their right to work. This takes minutes, not hours, if the systems are in place.
2. Require compliance packs before deployment
Contractually require agencies to provide a compliance pack for every worker they deploy — covering DBS disclosure, right-to-work status, qualifications, and any training relevant to the home's resident population. This pack should arrive before the worker does, not after the shift is over.
3. Maintain your own records
Do not rely on the agency holding records on your behalf. Maintain your own system — digital, not paper — that records which agency workers have worked at your home, when, and what their compliance status was at the time. If CQC or the FWA asks, you need to be able to produce this information within minutes.
4. Audit your agency supply chain
Know who your agencies subcontract to. Include clauses in your agency contracts that prohibit subcontracting without prior notification, and require that any subcontracted agency meets the same compliance standards you agreed with the primary agency.
5. Implement real-time status checks
Static compliance records go stale. A DBS certificate confirmed six months ago does not reflect today's status. Look for systems that provide real-time or near-real-time compliance status, so you know at the point of each shift — not once a quarter — whether the worker arriving is fully verified.
Families are starting to ask
The pressure for change is not coming only from regulators. Families are increasingly aware of the agency staffing model and the gaps it creates. The question "who is looking after Mum tonight?" is being asked with more frequency and more urgency, and "I think it's one of the agency staff" is no longer an acceptable answer.
Care homes that can demonstrate verifiable, real-time staffing records — showing not just who is on shift but confirming their identity and credentials — will have a significant competitive advantage in a market where trust is the differentiator.
Certifyd's verification platform enables care homes to confirm agency worker identity, DBS status, and right-to-work compliance at the point of arrival — creating an auditable record for every shift. See how Certifyd supports care providers.