Why are some care home providers still not paying care workers the National Minimum Wage?

The care sector has been branded ‘high risk’ by the Low Pay Commission for failing to pay their employees the National Minimum Wage.

I believe the National Living Wage is the least that care workers should receive for the important professional role they play in caring for older and vulnerable people.

In April the Government introduced the National Living Wage of £7.20 an hour for all working people aged 25 and over. The adult National Minimum Wage is currently £6.70 per hour.

The National Care Forum is fully committed to all staff within the care sector being appropriately rewarded. The NCF therefore welcomed the introduction of the National Living Wage (NLW), which is now law.

There can be no justification for care providers paying below the rate of the NLW. We support HMRC taking a zero tolerance approach and using their powers to prosecute any such care providers.

The National Living Wage (NLW) has only been law for a matter of weeks and it is probably too early to know for sure what impact it will have across the economy. “Britain is able to afford a pay rise. Because, let me be clear, Britain deserves a pay rise and Britain is getting a pay rise,” said Chancellor, George Osborne, heralding the NLW in his budget statement in 2015.

Of course the arguments that were made at the time about the benefits of increased productivity and improved retention are slightly more difficult to envisage for the care sector but arguably they are still potential benefits. My sense is that any real benefit for the care sector overall might have been overshadowed by the various announcements by care providers of the dire state of funding and finance being made worse by the introduction of this new policy from 1 April 2016. The public could be forgiven for assuming that the NLW for the care sector us a straight choice between sustainable services or pay.

Within the National Care Forum we have undertaken a survey of the workforce every year since 2004. As a result NCF has a rich source of data on trends and developments around the age profile of the workforce, average turnover and churn of staff, qualification rates and where people go when they leave.

We have worked hard to gain a much better understanding of what causes people to leave and where they go. The findings support my assumption that people rarely leave just because of pay. The NCF report published in July 2015 (before the announcement or implementation of the NLW) showed the following reasons for leaving.

This data draws on 51 care provider organisations and some 10,490 staff. Personal reasons (25.9 per cent) is the top reason given for leaving a post by far – as it has been in the NCF survey in most years. Career development had risen to second place in 2015 with significant increases over previous years and competition from other employers had increased again to rank in fourth place, now showing more than double the percentage recorded a few years earlier.

Although pay as a stand-alone reason for leaving remains low in the rankings, the significant rise in competition from other employers may lead us to consider pay to be a contributory factor in leaving. The combination of pay + nature of work + conditions of employment when taken together represent 10.1 per cent of the known reasons for choosing to leave (excluding those reasons beyond the control of the leaver e.g. dismissal, retirement, redundancy, ill health).

Everything I know reinforces a view that pay alone is not the primary reason that people are attracted to working in the care sector or a reason for leaving. Pay might be the reason after several other factors associated with the work cause frustration.

Let me be really clear, I think the NLW is the least that care workers should receive for the important professional role they have. But there needs to be a much better public understanding of the relationship between what is paid for care and what staff actually receive as pay.