The social care sector is under great pressure. Local government funding has been slashed since 2010, and earlier this year sector leaders warned that providing state-funded social care in England could become “almost impossible”.
More recently, there have been warnings that care homes are in trouble. Providers have met local authority leaders and charities for crisis talks on the possibility of care homes closing.
For Connor Kinsella, a care worker in Dorset, the pressures on the sector became very real when the home he worked at suddenly announced it had to close. In October, he and other staff received letters saying the home didn’t have enough residents to sustain staff and other costs. “It was devastating,” says Kinsella. “People really didn’t want to leave the residents, some of whom were very, very vulnerable.”
Kinsella had worked at the care home, which supported older people with dementia, for three years; he thought it was a very good home and that residents were well looked after. But he’d noticed the pressures: there were never enough workers due to difficulties recruiting, and often the home had to rely on agency care workers.
Kinsella was a social care trainer. “The social care situation meant that I went from having a very good practice as a trainer up until the 2010 election to suddenly having lots of cancelled bookings”. He started work as a care assistant alongside his training work, but now the home he worked for is closing, Kinsella is doing a nursing return to practice course so he can work as a nurse again after letting his registration lapse.
Chris Dunn, who manages a homecare company for people with learning disabilities, has also felt a personal impact of the wider issues in the sector. His parents ran a care organisation for more than 15 years, but in 2013 changes to funding saw a “significant cut” to some of their service users’ care packages.
“Subsequently my parents … felt it was unsafe to continue because they felt they wouldn’t be able to meet the service users’ needs appropriately,” Dunn says. They retired, and Dunn had to decide whether to continue with what was left. His organisation is small and employs 16 people; Dunn says things currently appear to be going OK“but there certainly seems to be a financial squeeze on the horizon”.
This pressure on care companies affects staff. Care work has never been well-paid. Zero-hours contracts and low wages are rife, particularly in domiciliary care, where workers are often not paid for the travel time between clients. They can therefore end up being paid less than the minimum wage. Kinsella says he knew of companies where workers weren’t paid for their training time, and had to pay for their own uniforms and DBS (Disclosure and Barring Service) checks. “Lots and lots of people in the social care sector … end up out of pocket just to have a job, which is ridiculous,” he says.
Laura Jones* works as a nurse at a nursing home in the north of England, and says while the pressures on the sector haven’t directly affected her, she can see the effects in the kind of service users the home is looking after. “People who are coming to us, their needs are greater, they’re really dependent. A few years ago they would have needed nursing care but they wouldn’t have needed quite so much.” She adds there is constant pressure from the NHS, which commissions care from the nursing home, to reduce fees and get more care for less money.
The sector is in a state of anticipation about what the spending review will mean for social care. If funding is cut further the impact will be felt down the line by providers and their staff.
One big change will be the introduction of the new national living wage of £7.20 in April 2016, up from £6.50. While this is good news for care staff, providers are worried about what the impact will be if the higher staffing costs aren’t mitigated by additional funding. Dunn thinks the new wage is a very positive change, but that funding has to be increased to match this. Otherwise, he says, providers could be squeezed so much that there could be closures and redundancies. To start a career in social care without job stability is going to look “pretty bleak”.
This is an issue because the sector already has problems with recruiting enough staff, yet it needs more people to meet the needs of an ageing population.
Dunn says that he hopes people aren’t put off working in social care because of pay and difficult conditions. “The nature of the work isn’t just about that, you get a lot back,” says Kinsella. “You can get off a shift at half past two and still feel, yeah, I’ve actually made a difference here, I’ve actually done something really good today.”
*Laura Jones is a pseudonym to protect their identity
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