Page 42 - Unfair To Care 2024 - Who Cares Wins

EVER-INCREASING PRESSURE
SECTION 6: THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS
Hft and Care England’s 2024 ‘Sector Pulse Check’ report indicates that the most significant pressure facing organisations is workforce-related costs, with nearly all providers of services for older persons (98%) and 93% of learning disability care providers highlighting this as a key cost pressure.
“Our Sector Pulse Check research, written in partnership with Care England, highlights how low pay drives recruitment and retention challenges. Nearly all providers we surveyed – 91% - stated that higher pay would have the greatest impact upon recruiting and retaining staff.
While providers want to ensure their invaluable staff receive remuneration that is commensurate with the skill and responsibility of their role, pay represents a significant financial pressure, particularly due to insufficient fees paid by local authorities. 79% told us that in 2023, local authority fee increases did not even cover the impact of the National Living Wage (NLW) rise, leaving providers to foot the bill.
With some local authorities reportedly offering a 0% fee increase to providers this coming financial year, against a 9.4% rise to the NLW, financial pressures will likely intensify. This contributes to instability and unmet need, with providers forced to close services and hand back contacts, make staff redundancies and offer care to fewer people.
In line with calls in this report, Hft want to see an uplift to the pay of social care staff, but this must be fully funded and ringfenced by central government to guarantee funding reaches care providers.”
Hft
WOMEN BEAR THE BRUNT AND LOW PAY FUELS INEQUALITY:
The Health Foundation38 said in January 2023 that social care workers – the overwhelming majority of whom are women – play a vital role in society but are among the lowest paid workers in the
UK, and experience high levels of poverty and deprivation. Many cannot afford food, rent, clothing, and other essentials, putting their health and wellbeing at risk, as well as presenting a clear moral injustice.
Skills for Care’s State of the Sector report demonstrates that women make up 81% of the social care sector. With 1.2 million women working in social care, the
lack of fair and equal pay in such a vast sector compounds wider issues of gender equality in
society. Improving pay in social care would help close the overall UK gender pay gap.
There is a wealth of evidence that women have historically been undervalued across industries. The lack of funding for parity of pay between social care workers and people with equivalent or simpler roles in other sectors, reflects longstanding societal inequalities, despite equal pay legislation over many years to bring it to an end.
It must also be emphasised that, as a diverse sector, the pay issues in social care also contribute to wider societal inequalities. The TUC ‘Strategy for a Care Workforce’39 states that 25% of social care employees come from a black or ethnic minority background, compared with 15% across all workers.
Parity of pay in social care makes levelling up a reality for many who face the greatest inequalities in society.
AS A VALUES-LED EMPLOYER, COMMUNITY INTEGRATED CARE WANTS TO OFFER ITS EMPLOYEES ALL THE SUPPORT IT CAN. HOWEVER, IT MEANS THE CHARITY FURTHER STRETCHING ITS RESOURCES, AND COMPOUNDS THE FINANCIAL PRESSURES THAT IT, AND MOST OTHER CARE PROVIDERS, FACE.
38. ‘Health Foundation response to Rishi Sunak comments on care workers’, The Health Foundation, January 2023
39. ’A strategy for the care workforce’, TUC, August 2023
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