Page 4 - Unfair To Care 2024 - Who Cares Wins

1.WELCOME TO UNFAIR TO CARE
TERESA EXELBY, CHIEF CORPORATE SERVICES & PEOPLE OFFICER AT COMMUNITY INTEGRATED CARE
SECTION 1: WELCOME
WELCOME TO UNFAIR TO CARE, A UNIQUE REPORT THAT EXPLORES THE DAMAGING IMPACT OF THE SOCIAL CARE PAY GAP AND
THE ENORMOUS POTENTIAL TO SUSTAINABLY ADDRESS IT TO TRANSFORM LIVES, SOCIETY, AND THE ECONOMY.
The social care recruitment and retention crisis is one of the greatest challenges facing society today. For too long, we have faced an irreversible trend
of people who have a unique gift for changing lives, leaving the careers that they love.
Social care, which should be a sector that creates foundational stability and transformative opportunity in our communities, is deteriorating – creating an overwhelming chain of negative impacts that affect people who draw on support, care workers, family carers, public services, and our economy.
At the heart of this is the issue of low and unfair pay. Skills for Care’s annual state of the sector report1 shows that
on any given day there are 152,000 vacant roles in
social care – hundreds of thousands of people are facing inconsistent or unavailable support due to a lack of capacity. 390,000 people left their jobs in 2023, with turnover rates remaining stubbornly high at 28.3%. Why?
One clear answer can be found in the issue of pay.
As you will read in this report, social care roles are provably skilled, complex, and accountable, requiring rare vocational qualities. Yet, funding for providers has meant that Support Workers’ pay has failed to meet their true market value – and has, in fact, been consistently below a living wage for years.
This is unreasonable, unfair and unacceptable. It has resulted in a complicated recruitment and retention problem which, to some degree, has a simple cause
– why should people do work that demands a
lot of them, for less than they deserve?
UNDISPUTABLE FACT
In 2021, Community Integrated Care sought to explore and strengthen the case for action by shifting the debate from one of moral subjectivity to objective fact.
Unfair To Care provided the first-ever independent assessment of the frontline Support Worker role and rates of pay. Undertaken by Korn Ferry, the world- leading experts in job evaluation, this in-depth analysis proved that, far from being low-skilled, the Support Worker role is clearly technically, emotionally, and physically demanding, and requires the application of a wide range of innate and developed skills.
This analysis revealed that the most typical Support Worker role had parity with the National Health Service’s Band 3 position. It pointed to a wealth of evidence that greater stability and impact could be achieved through introducing objective pay bandings within social care – with alignment to the NHS – and the development of a national workforce strategy.
Now three years on, the 2024 edition of Unfair To Care presents a juxtaposing message of both crisis and opportunity. Whilst the challenges of recruitment and retention remain, we can also look forward with renewed hope, with a growing consensus across society, the care sector, and policymakers, in the case for change.
As we finalised this report in early 2024, the gap between social care workers and their NHS counterparts remained stark. The average care worker takes home £7,617 less, on average, than they would do in the same role within the NHS – a 35.6% pay gap. With an average rate of pay of £10.932, colleagues with enormous accountability and rare skills are paid £1.07 less than the Real Living Wage – the rate of pay that has been independently calculated
as the minimum to meet everyday costs of living.
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1. ‘The state of the adult social care sector and workforce in England’, Skills for Care, October 2023
2. Figures used are average rates for Support Worker roles in England (outside London) and are taken from the National
Care Forum’s national pay benchmarking exercise of the not-for-profit sector, October 2023