Page 26 - Unfair To Care 2024 - Who Cares Wins

DECLINING FORTUNES
NOMINAL AND REAL-TERM CARE WORKER MEAN HOURLY RATE IN CARE HOMES WITHOUT NURSING FROM 2016/17 TO 2022/23
£9.57
£7.61
2016/17
NOMINAL
£9.69 £9.89
£10.18
£8.58
2019/20
REAL-TERM
£10.66
£9.05
2020/21
£10.37
£9.42
2021/22
£10.08
£10.08
2022/23
£7.89
£8.21
2017/18 2018/19
UNDERVALUED
SECTION 5: THE RESULTS – 2023/24
Community Integrated Care’s Unfair To Care data is supported by Skills for Care’s ‘State of the adult social care sector and workforce in England’ report, which tracks average pay rates over time. Their report showed that in the two years before March 2023 the average real pay fell from £10.66 to £10.08 an hour for care home staff, and from £11.11 to £10.50 an hour for domiciliary care staff.
Moreover, when reviewing ‘real-terms’ pay data – the economic method of establishing the rates of pay when adjusted to account for inflation at the Consumers
Price Index rate – we can see that care workers are paid less well now than they were in 2020/21.
Whilst the average social care worker is poorly rewarded when compared to their direct peers, they are also significantly undervalued in a far broader societal sense.
To take just one sector, Korn Ferry’s analysis demonstrates that the role of the care and support worker is significantly bigger than the role of a retail assistant. However, the gap between social care and retail workers is vast and growing.
As just one example, at the time of publishing, the discount supermarket chain, Lidl, announced that
its entry level rates for staff outside of the M25 had increased to £12, rising to £13 with length of service, for those working within the ring road, from £12.85 to £13.55 and increasing to £13.85 over time. This is in addition to a £2 per hour Bank Holiday premium and generous employee benefits28. This same pattern can be seen across major retail and logistics organisations,
28. Lidl invest 37m in staff pay increase – Retail Gazette
29. Amazon UK to spend 170 mln stg on staff pay rises | Reuters
30. Low Pay Commission Report, 2022
31. ’The real cost of living’, The Living Wage Foundation, February 2024
with Amazon, for example, investing £170 million in increasing frontline pay twice in just a six month period29.
Social care has been defined as a low-paying industry by the Low Pay Commission every year since the ‘First Report of the Low Pay Commission’ on the National Minimum Wage in 1998, including the current Low Pay Commission report 202230.
The average frontline care and support worker earns just 5% more than the National Living Wage – the legal minimum salary.
In fact, their pay rate was 10% less than the Real Living Wage in 2023. In short, frontline care and support workers earn on average £1.07 an hour, or 10%, less than the hourly rate of pay that has been independently calculated by the Living Wage Foundation31 as the minimum to meet their everyday costs of living.
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