The Employments Rights Bill is a unique opportunity to improve the workforce crisis in social care but must not come at the expense of stability for the people who draw on care and support.
We welcome the government’s recognition that the social care workforce must receive better pay and terms and conditions. It is a step forward in highlighting the importance of the social care sector and improving job security.
Wages in the social care sector are too low for people to sustain a good standard of living. Worrying about personal and financial security increases stress, adding to absence rates. Low wages affect retention, and we see staff moving out of social care into food services and retail for very small increases in wages. Staff changes has the knock-on effect of reducing the continuity of support for the people supported, ultimately impacting on their wellbeing.
However, introducing a negotiating body without improving how social care funding is determined, would present a Catch-22 situation with a destabilised provider marketplace seeking cash injections to plug the growing funding gap.
The government has not yet set out how the measures affecting social care would be resourced. Local authority funding settlements already do not provide enough funding to meet existing or rising demand for social care. Councils’ budgets are at breaking point with many councils already indicating that services and support for disabled adults will be negatively affected by upcoming cost savings planned by the government.
This means that pay awards are often funded out of charitable or not-for-profit reserves, reducing their long-term sustainability.
To raise the minimum wage of care workers to £12 an hour, More Than A Provider members would incur an average additional cost of £1.3 million a year, equating to £400,000 for every 1,000 care workers we employ.
The backdrop to this is a precarious situation due to the years of underfunding in social care. To avoid the risk of pushing providers into bankruptcy the government must introduce a provision so that the new Adult Social Care Negotiating Body informs the Local Government Funding Settlement to ensure that providers are funded to meet the pay agreement and ensure market stability.
Alongside the measures in the Employment Right’s Bill, which will take time to implement, there is more that needs to be done to improve recruitment into social care which is why we are calling on the government to make working in a front-line social care role exempt from paying council tax. This would immediately increase take home pay with no extra cost to providers.
The social care sector should be viewed as the cornerstone of our society, beyond its essential service it adds £68.1 billion in gross value added to the economy in England.
This is a step forward but the adult social care sector requires a comprehensive approach that draws on the expertise of stakeholders to move away from firefighting into fixing and growing in a way that values its workforce and meets the needs of the communities it serves.
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