Tens of thousands of care workers are still being paid below the national minimum wage despite new regulation designed to ensure they are paid fairly, a new study says.
Despite a change in the law and a major HMRC investigation, care firms are still failing to pay staff for travel between clients according to the research from Unison, based on Freedom of Information responses from more than 150 councils in England and Wales.
It found that more than 75 per cent of councils in England and 90 per cent of councils in Wales are failing to ensure that care providers pay their employees correctly.
The care industry, which employs about 1.4 million people in UK, has long been associated with low pay and is facing dual pressures from funding cuts and an ageing population.
Unison general secretary David Prentis, said: “It’s a scandal that more than 200,000 care workers are receiving illegal wages of less than £6.70… Councils shouldn’t be awarding contracts to firms without ensuring they’re prepared to pay travel time.”
Unison said the figures showed a modest improvement on last year, but the failure to pay for travel time remains “endemic” despite the new provisions of the Care Act. Mr Prentis added: “The law makes it absolutely clear that staff must be paid for any time spent travelling to and from the homes of the people they care for.”
The union is now is calling for the health regulator, the Quality Care Commission, to be given power to inspect how local authorities commission care. It is also calling for greater transparency for local authority pay rates, as well as spot inspections of providers’ payroll records. The UK Homecare Association estimates that workers spend 20 per cent of their working day travelling.
HMRC is currently investigating 100 firms over their failure to pay staff the national minimum wage, which the Resolution Foundation think-tank estimates costs care workers £130m a year in lost wages. HMRC says it has acted against 557 firms since April last year and clawed back more than £8m of wages for workers.
Laura Gardiner, of the Resolution Foundation, said: “It’s a complex situation and it’s possible for firms to purposely or accidentally fail to pay the minimum wage, but the law is the law and there is no excuse.
“The bottom line is that care providers should not accept a contract from a local authority if they think it is going to force them to behave illegally.”
The Department for Work and Pensions and the Department of Health failed to respond to requests for a comment.
Case study: Rachel Lindfield, 26
I was a homecare worker for about 18 months. I earnt only £4 or £5 an hour – well below the minimum wage – because my company wouldn’t pay me for the time it took to travel between service users. On an average day I’d spend four and a half hours in people’s homes and over two hours travelling between them. But I’d only be paid for the time spent in their homes.
Because calls were often organised back to back, it meant many workers were forced to cut time from calls to arrive on time to the next. I would end up leaving 10 minutes early to be on time.
It was not until I began to work in the office to recruit care workers and read an article about this issue, that I realised that not paying care workers’ travel time was actually illegal.”
