Care Workers: Professional Register

Baroness Finlay of Llandaff Excerpts

Monday 10th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kamall (Con)]

As the noble Baroness will appreciate, many people who work in social care are employed by private care home owners and other bits of the sector. If she looks at the minimum wage, there has been an announcement of 6.6%, effective from 1 April, which means that workers will be paid more, but one of the bases of some of the additional funding that we have announced is to convince local authorities to put pressure on private care home owners and others to make sure that they pay staff more.

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)]

Given that the Government have clearly expressed the view that social care must be adequately valued, which is to be welcomed, and the comments about pay scales, what is the Government’s attitude to those employers in the private sector who do not hand on pay at time-and-a-half on bank holidays and so on, to their front-line staff? These front-line staff feel exploited and do not receive any pay or reimbursement for travel time between clients, even though they may spend quite a lot of time on the road. They are paid only while they are actually in somebody’s home in the community.

[Lord Kamall (Con)]

Issues such as the way private care home owners treat their staff are all part of the consultation that we launched on 6 January. We are working across government and with the devolved Administrations to seek views on the proposed criteria on which the profession should be regulated, whether there are regulated professions that no longer require statutory regulation, and whether there are unregulated professions that should be brought into statutory regulation. The consultation will run for 12 weeks until 31 March, when we will look at the results before taking further action.