The number of people who need home care funded by their local authority is expected to rise by 61% between 2018 and 2038. Skills for Care estimates a need for 440,000 more care workers by 2035 to meet this rising demand for formal social care services.
Yet a former home care worker who recently got in touch with Homecare Workers' Group said:
"I used to do home care and I absolutely loved it. I loved being able to keep people home, safe and independent. I have since left and work in a care home. I made this decision as I wanted paying fairly for my time"..."Lots of people who could effect change are being pushed out due to not being able to afford to live".
Whenever an otherwise committed home care worker leaves their role, this has a detrimental impact on continuity and quality of support available to those individuals with whom they had developed a supportive relationship. The same former home care worker explained the context around their decision to leave as follows:
"I was not paid my travel time. The job had advertised a very good hourly rate, but then you are only paid for 5 hours in a 9 hour day, or 6.5 hours in a 12 hour day, and that's if I was lucky. Calls were timed awkwardly so I could never have a proper break or pop home at any point. Just 20 minutes waiting, wasting time, in my car. You cannot plan your money or time as calls are put on or taken off at short notice. This was a highly reputable company"
It remains the norm for home care workers to only be paid for direct contact time with clients. That means we are not paid for the time we spend travelling between visits, despite the fact this legally counts as working time. As a result, our true hourly rate of pay is always much lower that what is stated on our contract. In 2020, a group of home care workers in London were awarded £100,000 on successfully taking their employer to court over the impact of unpaid travel time on their true hourly rate of pay.
In many cases, employers rightly top up their employees' wages with each payroll, but only to ensure compliance with National Minimum Wage. Whenever this happens, said employee is earning no more than precisely the National Minimum Wage, often far less than the advertised / contracted hourly rate. This situation is rarely communicated to staff. By pulling the wool over the eyes of home care workers in this way, thousands of individuals who provide essential support within our communities are being disrespected at an institutional level.
Here at Homecare Workers' Group, on behalf of over 200 members we voluntarily calculate how much someone has really been paid per hour for a shift once their unpaid travel time is taken into account. So far, the true hourly pay rate of every single person who has submitted their shift information has fallen below the National Minimum Wage of £11.44 per hour. This was even the case for someone whose contracted hourly rate was £14.40 an hour. The shift in question included one 25 minute gap, two 20 minute gaps and six 5 minute gaps. In another example, we found somebody's true hourly pay rate to be just £8 an hour, despite them being contracted £12 per hour.
We call for an end to misleading pay rates within home care, which mean workers must be at work for significantly longer than they are paid for, forcing many out of the workforce in favour of roles which offer a healthier work/life balance and more predictable income.
Specifically, it should be mandatory that all home care workers are explicitly paid for their in-work travel time.
To remain financially solvent, many employers would likely need to lower their contracted hourly rates of pay in order to implement such a change, but only to a level which accurately reflects what they already pay once travel time is taken into account. For employers who are already compliant with the National Minimum Wage, topping up wages where necessary with each payroll, such a change would likely make little material difference to their staffing costs.
Yet improved transparency of pay is essential for those home care workers whose employers are unscrupulous and currently get away with paying illegally below the National Minimum Wage because of a widespread lack of awareness and enforcement around this issue.
In an environment where employers are struggling to recruit, individual employers cannot be expected to voluntarily start paying travel time, as they may fear losing prospective staff to competitors upon lowering their advertised rate of pay. Therefore, top-down intervention is necessary.
A common response when a conversation around unpaid travel time takes place with professional sector stakeholders is for them to point to evidence that local authorities already insist home care workers are paid for their travel time, as per the conditions of UNISON's widely signed Ethical Care Charter and other iterations of values-based commissioning. Yet over a quarter of people who draw on long-term care use Direct Payments: the home care providers they choose to engage are not bound by any local-authority commitment to paid travel time, as I wrote about recently in this article for the Local Government Association.
If we are at all serious about addressing the recruitment and retention challenge facing social care, then ensuring transparency of pay for home care workers is essential. There are practical barriers, such as the need to support employers with adjusting how pay is calculated away from a contact-time only model. Yet such obstacles should not prevent action on this essential matter for improved staff retention. On a human level, this issue speaks to a systemic lack of respect and dignity for home care workers.
I recently spoke about some of the above on Parliament Green, voicing the words of Homecare Workers' Group members as close to the physical centre of power in England as possible:
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