1. The proposals do nothing for the majority of people who provide social care
The social care provided to adults by 5.4 million unpaid carers in the UK is valued at up to £100bn a year, according to a 2018 National Audit Office report – nearly five times the amount spent on publicly funded care. Too often these unpaid carers – mostly women – themselves experience poverty, stress and ill health. Boris Johnson’s new plans for social care offer them no more than a vague promise to “take steps” to help unpaid carers get “support, advice and respite”. In financial terms, however, the allowance given to nearly a million full-time carers is currently a paltry £67.60 a week.
2. They do very little for the people who provide the rest of our social care
The vast majority of our 1.5 million care workers work for private companies and earn £8.50 an hour on average. Their pay has fallen behind that of cleaners and sales assistants over the last decade. And it’s certainly very different from how care workers are paid in Scandinavia, where they earn three quarters of the wage of the average nurse. Unfilled social care vacancies in England have risen to 112,000. Working conditions are intense, so nearly a third change jobs each year, meaning little continuity of care for clients.
The £500m earmarked for investing in the social care workforce, spread over three years, works out at about £2 extra each week per care worker
(it won’t actually go into their pay packet, but into measures that are supposed to “support professional development and… long-term wellbeing”).
