Local authorities have a role to play in making sure care workers are properly remunerated for looking after our most vulnerable, says Sherry Malik, director of children and adults for the London Borough of Hounslow.
The economic recovery may be underway, but research suggests the upturn won’t help the lower paid and living standards are at their lowest for a decade, writes Sherry Malik. So what does this mean for those commissioning adult social care?
The Resolution Foundation recently suggested that up to one in 10 care workers is paid less than the current minimum wage of £6.19 per hour. The living wage, which is set at £7.45 outside London and £8.55 in the capital, is about ensuring a balance exists between the minimum wage and the realities of rising rents, food prices and other costs of living.
Hounslow council members have championed the London living wage because it makes sense on a number of levels. Our lead member for adult social care, Shantanu Rajawat, believes it is morally right to properly reward people who do a critically important job caring for our most vulnerable adults. Care workers must be able to carry out their tasks in a way which maintains the dignity and respect of those they care for.
Fibrogirl, a disability rights campaigner on Twitter, recently tweeted: “Imagine never knowing who will come to do your ‘care’ visit each day, then getting naked with a stranger within 5 mins would you?” It makes you think, doesn’t it? Imagine that was you – the person coming into your home needs to be someone you can trust, who is skilled and valued accordingly by the wage they are paid.
It needs to be a wage that values and rewards their skills and behaviours and confers a status which is higher than many basic jobs in service sector industries. We must recognise that care workers deserve to be properly remunerated for looking after our most vulnerable.
In Hounslow, our commissioning is based on the belief that a quality intervention delivers better outcomes and costs less money in the long run. Appropriately skilled and motivated workers can reduce dependency and enable people to take more control over their lives. Can you imagine a commercial sector organisation saying that it would thrive if it did not pay its most skilled workers a fair salary?
Adult social care workers tend to be mainly women, many from working class backgrounds and living and working locally. Paying them a fair wage and rewarding their skills makes sense for local economies, as these wages tend to be spent in local shops and businesses, who in turn provide taxation receipts to the council.
The worry for many councils that have not embraced the living wage is that it would add to current unit costs. This does not have to be the case. In Hounslow, in addition to a strategic and collaborative approach with providers to pare down costs, we have introduced a personal care framework, which outlines four levels of skill for care givers; the council will commission services dependent upon the skill levels of the worker required. For example, the council will pay significantly more for a worker trained in managing people whose behaviours challenge services (and often end up in expensive institutional services) than it will for a support worker who is required to befriend and help someone develop confidence to reconnect with their social networks.
My assistant director Shaun O’Leary and I believe you pay more for skilled intervention, which is more effective in a shorter period of time and therefore costs less in the long run. The race to the bottom for the lowest unit cost is not sustainable and will certainly cause damage to those who are most vulnerable and who we are meant to have the highest duty of care for. A skilled care worker is well worth the living wage.
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