Yesterday, the Department of Health and HMRC launched a voluntary sleep-in shift pay compliance scheme to support the social care sector and identify back pay for workers.
It gives providers 12 months to work out how much they may owe workers and a further three months to pay up. However, there is no government support to fund the hundreds of millions that could be owed to sleep-in workers.
The issue of back pay arose after two employment tribunal decisions ruled that care workers who slept at clients’ homes should be paid an hourly rate in line with the minimum wage rather than a flat rate ‘on call’ allowance.
Social care providers fear that a requirement to fund historic liabilities could bankrupt many, forcing contracts to return to councils and increasing pressure on an already overstretched sector.
The Royal Mencap Society said providers would meet the move with “dismay”.
Chair Derek Lewis said: “It completely fails to give any reassurance to people with a learning disability that their homes and care are secure and to carers that their jobs are not under threat.
“Three months on from the government’s commitment to seek a solution to the devastating £400m liability hanging over the sector, there is only the promise of further delay and no commitment, even in principle, to accept responsibility for a liability created by government changing the rules.”
He added that the government had been slow to issue guidance to local authority care commissioners that they should in future be funding the increased cost of sleep-ins.
“Over half of local authorities are still refusing to do so. It is quite wrong that providers should be expected to subsidise the increased cost of on-going sleep-in care,” Lewis said.
Izzi Seccombe, chair of the Local Government Association’s community wellbeing board, said the compliance scheme would not end the uncertainty for providers, care workers and people receiving care.
She called on the government to release “genuinely new funding to deal with back-payment.”
Seccombe said: “If the government does not fund the historic liability then we are likely to see more care providers going bust, more contracts being handed back to councils, and care workers being made unemployed.”
She added that sleep-in costs being incurred here and now also needed to be addressed.
“It is wrong to assume the spring Budget £2bn for social care can cover this additional burden. The forthcoming Budget needs to inject new money into social care to meet this pressure.”
