Care workers to get £13.60 minimum from April in first fair pay deal

Care workers in England will be paid at least £13.60 an hour from April under the first agreement reached by the adult social care negotiating body, a rate 80p above the national living wage and the first time a sector-wide minimum has been set for 1.6 million people who are among the lowest paid in the country.

The agreement, announced on Monday after six months of talks between unions, employers and the government, also sets a £14.90 minimum for senior care workers with relevant qualifications and guarantees paid travel time between visits for home care staff. The Department of Health and Social Care estimated the cost at £1.2bn a year and said councils would receive £850m through the local government settlement to meet it.

“For the first time in my working life, the job I do has a price on it that was not set by whoever was cheapest,” said Marta Kowalczyk, 41, who has worked in home care in Swansea and then Bristol for 14 years and sat on the negotiating body as a union representative. “Eighty pence does not sound much. For a 38-hour week it is £1,600 a year. For a lot of the women I work with, that is the difference between the heating going on and not.”

Care providers gave the deal a cautious welcome but said the funding gap would fall on them. Nigel Pountney, who runs two care homes near Ludlow with 86 staff, said the rise would cost him £140,000 a year. “The council pays me £820 a week per resident. The real cost is £1,050. They will give me an uplift that covers about half of this, and I will make up the rest by not replacing the maintenance man,” he said. “I support it. I just need somebody to pay for it.”

The Local Government Association said the £850m allocation covered the direct wage cost but not the knock-on effect on differentials or the cost to self-funding residents, whose fees were likely to rise by 4% to 6%. “Councils have been asking for a fair pay agreement for years,” a spokesperson said. “We also asked for it to be funded. We got three-quarters of the first and all of the second on paper.”

The agreement has legal force under legislation passed last year that allows the government to set binding terms for the sector. Employers who pay below the rate from April will be liable to enforcement by HMRC in the same way as national living wage breaches.

About 120,000 posts in adult social care are vacant, and the sector lost 70,000 workers to retail and hospitality in the year to March, where pay was comparable and the work less demanding. The negotiating body will meet again in the spring to begin talks on sick pay, which most care workers currently receive only at the statutory minimum.