Many homecare workers are not going to benefit from today’s rise in the Living Wage – indeed they are lucky to get the National Minimum Wage. Councils must do more to ensure homecare workers are properly remunerated
With a 20 pence an hour increase in the Living Wage to £7.85 just announced, it’s time to spare a thought for an important group of workers who will be lucky to see the National Minimum Wage of £6.50 pence an hour in their pay packets this week. And who might they be? Yep, you’ve got it. Homecare workers.
Following up our earlier research which highlighted endemic poverty pay and zero hours contracts among those who care for our elderly and vulnerable at home, Unsion’s local government team recently sent a Freedom of Information request to all upper-tier councils in England and Wales. We asked whether they require their homecare providers to pay travel time between visits and comply with the National Minimum Wage. We also wanted to know if they scrutinise payment records to check NMW compliance by contractors.
Non-payment of travel time is the main reason why an estimated 220,000 homecare workers are currently denied the statutory NMW and why many providers are therefore breaking the law. With basic pay rates frequently at – or just above – £6.50 an hour, failure to pay travel time between client visits reduces hourly pay to below the NMW. It’s a practice, which HMRC has deemed unlawful because travel time between visits is rightly viewed as working time. But it’s a practice that obviously continues.
The results from the 98% of councils that responded were shocking. Ninety-three per cent of the English local authorities don’t make payment for travel time between visits a requirement in their contracts with providers. Make that 100% in Wales. Seventy nine per cent never ask to see payment records to check whether homecare workers are receiving the NMW, let alone a Living Wage which they might actually be able to live on! Some councils said they rely on the Care Quality Commission or Department for Work and Pensions to carry out such checks – even though neither agency has any duty to do so.
Before anyone suggests that they might be ignorant of the hardship facing our homecare members - mostly women – please stop now! Failure of contractors to comply with the NMW and poor working conditions are both well documented and my team has had regular contact with the Association of Directors of Social Services and government ministers to highlight them.
Unison blew the whistle on both in our Time To Care research several years ago. Eminent academics like Dr Shereen Hussein and professors Jill Rubery and Sian Moore have all carried out research which details low pay and the negative impact of outsourcing on homecare workers. In a well-publicised study carried out between 2011 and 2013, HMRC’s NMW compliance unit found that 50% of providers were not paying the wage and the Low Pay Commission has also voiced its concern about underfunding of homecare and breach of the NMW in successive reports. So, no excuses please.
Why is it still happening? Why are those who make sure that clients can live comfortably and safely at home, reduce expensive hospital ‘bed blocking’ and admissions to residential care, administer medicines and stoma care and change catheters not worth even the legal minimum basic pay? After all, many are doing what district nurses once did for far higher earnings and esteem.
The most obvious answer lies in underfunding and cuts. The coalition’s so-called ‘austerity’ programme has hit hardest in local government, with an average reduction of 40% in council funding in the course of this parliament. Day care and home care have seen the worst of those cuts. Between 2009/10 and 2012/13, there was a 23% reduction in expenditure, coupled with a 46% decline in meals-on-wheels, while the number of elderly people requiring care rose by 14%. With cuts projected to continue until 2020 according to the Institute of Fiscal Studies and the percentage of people over 85 set to double in the next twenty years, things can only get worse.
A second answer lies in outsourcing. Around 97% of all homecare services are now outsourced to the private or voluntary sectors, while many councils with in-house services are planning to create arms-length homecare organisations or co-ops and divest themselves of responsibility for them. Outsourcing or ‘arms-lengthening’ invariably mean that rates of pay based on equal pay reviews are reduced, as are working conditions. At the same time, vast sums of public money are spent on procurement processes and profits of external providers, while homecare workers and their clients suffer.
The scourge of the 15-minute visit, high turnover of staff – about 30% a year – and lack of training are now common knowledge. Our members are routinely required to get elderly and immobile people out of bed, bathed, breakfasted and settled in a quarter of an hour. Those who overrun their ‘slots’ are penalised or forced to spend even less time with subsequent clients. Many give their own unpaid time to care for people who are not getting the care they need or deserve.
The third factor must be the workforce profile. Most homecare workers are women aged over 45, many with caring responsibilities for elderly parents or grandchildren of their own. Most do the job because they want to make a difference. It is hard not to believe that the unpaid and underpaid goodwill of women is being taken for granted and that old ideas about ‘pin money’ and ‘secondary incomes’ are at play in the declining value placed on some of the most valuable workers in our society.
Unison’s Ethical Care Charter calls on councils to pay up for travel time, pay homecarers the Living Wage and stop 15-minute visits. Some – like Islington and Southwark – have not just signed up. They have also begun to bring the service back in-house. In doing so, they have found that they can provide a more efficient, high quality service and cut out unnecessary travel time, procurement costs and public money lost in profit margins. One thing is certain though: the crisis hitting our members’ pockets and clients’ care will not be solved without a significant increase in funding. The sixth richest economy in the world should be able to manage that.
