LOCAL AUTHORITY PRICES

We are keeping a watchful eye on local authority price increases from April. This really matters!

Home care needs to give substantial increases to support assistants this year. Minimum wage itself is going up by over 6% - but home care workers need more than this.

Post-Covid, hospitality opened up and couldn’t find staff so companies started offering wage increases of 20% and more.

Add to this the fact that there is a cohort still of excellent potential workers who have fears of returning to front-line social care because of the pandemic, and you have a labour market that is demanding an inflation-busting pay rise for home care.

One local authority gave almost unprecedented interim rate increases of around 7% in December.

That was good.

Unfortunately however, they are giving nothing more in April. This is insufficient.

Perhaps at last the government is recognising this – we will talk next week about Fair Cost of Care.