A new idea: a Carer’s Minimum Wage

Sir Edward Davey, M.P

Last month in the Berrylands Companion, I set out some ideas for tackling the crisis in our NHS. I wrote for example about the urgent need for more nurses and GPs, and set out how you could achieve a boost to their numbers.

This month I want to focus more on the social care side of the NHS challenge. For if you care about the NHS, you must care about care – for the major cause of the terrible NHS crisis is the crisis in social care. Thousands of people are stranded in hospital because they aren’t enough care workers to look after them in their own home, or in a care home. New figures show only 2 in 5 people leave hospital when they are ready to do so.

With beds being used by patients who should have been discharged, the end result for the NHS is a damaging back-up, with long waits in A&E units and dangerous ambulance delays – key elements of today’s NHS crisis.

The shortage in care workers

When you do focus on the social care crisis, the key problem is immediately apparent: too few staff.

And the shortage of care workers is far greater than the shortage of NHS staff: there are currently 165,000 vacancies for care workers. That’s the equivalent of more than one-in-ten frontline care jobs being unfilled. And this problem has been getting far worse, with social care vacancies increasing by 55,000 since last year.

The cause of these alarming figures is also immediately apparent: pay. Despite having a tough and important job to do, many care workers are paid less than some of the lowest-paid jobs in most supermarkets and in hospitality. Around 1 in 3 care workers are only paid the national minimum wage, currently £9.50 an hour.

A Carers’ Minimum Wage

So I’m proposing a straightforward solution: pay care workers more, starting with a new Carers’ Minimum Wage, set at £2 an hour higher than the National Minimum Wage.

Caring is a skilled job that should anyway be more highly valued than it is – so even new recruits to the caring profession deserve more than most are paid now. But even if the Government doesn’t buy this skills and fairness argument, Ministers must realise that they will never fix the shortage of carers and thus the NHS crisis if they don’t act on carers’ pay.

And I’ve argued that the cost of this plan – nearly £1 billion – should be paid for by raising more tax from the gambling industry, a sector that Public Health England argues is imposing significant costs on our NHS.

All the research backs up this minimum wage plan. Even the Government’s own advisory body on labour force issues, the Migration Advisory Committee, and the NHS Confederation have called for a higher minimum wage for carers.

And in a detailed paper published last month, the Resolution Foundation (an independent think tank) made a very similar case to mine, for a Carers’ Minimum Wage of an extra £2 an hour above the national minimum wage. In their report Who Cares? they draw on the experience of care workers and mine the available data, to conclude that this policy could make a credible difference to recruitment and retention, so improving the capacity of the social care sector to look after people being discharged from hospital.

Campaigning for a Carers’ Minimum Wage

So I’ve now launched a major new campaign for care workers, to urge the Government to adopt this plan for a Carers’ Minimum Wage.

Starting in early February when I launched the idea on BBC TV’s the Laura Kuensberg show, followed up by pressing the Prime Minister in the Commons, I’m determined to make the voice of carers heard.

I’m keen to hear your reaction to my plan – so please email me your thoughts on edward.davey.mp@parliament.uk

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