Social Services: Minimum Wage

(asked on 8th April 2019) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to ensure that social care providers have the capacity to pay their staff the national minimum wage for sleep-in shifts.


Answered by
Caroline Dinenage Portrait
Caroline Dinenage
This question was answered on 11th April 2019

Last year’s Court of Appeal judgment on sleep in shifts should not be used as an opportunity to make ad-hoc changes to the fees paid to providers without consultation. I recently wrote to Local Authority Directors of Adult Social Services to communicate this view.

The Government has continued to invest in the sector, with an additional £2 billion of funding for care in the Spring Budget 2017, in part to support a sustainable market. The ongoing cost of paying for sleep-in shifts at National Minimum Wage/National Living Wage rates was acknowledged as a pressure on local care markets, and the Government took account of these costs in deciding to provide this sum of additional funding.

The Government provided a further £150 million of adult social care support grant in the 2018/19 Local Government Finance Settlement to help manage market pressures.

An ageing society means that we need to reach a longer-term sustainable settlement for social care. This is why the Government has committed to publishing a Social Care Green Paper at the earliest opportunity setting out its proposals for reform. The Green Paper will cover a range of issues and Government has already invested funding to put social care on a more stable footing and alleviate short-term pressures across the health and care system. Social care funding for future years will be settled in the Spending Review, where the overall approach to funding local government will be considered in the round.

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