Changing through doing: funding a better system for care workers

The 3 million people working in care sectors in the UK do life-enhancing work every day, supporting people to thrive. And yet for years we have known that they face real challenges – they continue to be some of the worst-paid workers in our country, some even below the minimum wage, all while undertaking work with high levels of responsibility. This is true across care systems like adult social care, children’s social care and childcare, and is rooted in a cultural devaluation of the act of caring. 

JRF has multiple methods to better understand and solve these problems – as a funder, we support groups and communities across the UK to transition to a more just society, and as a think-tank we generate analysis and ideas to secure policy changes needed to build this new society. 

We are calling for a new social contract between government and providers where receiving government funding would depend on providers demonstrating positive action around workers’ pay and conditions. We’re also calling for a new strategy for the childcare workforce, one which values their labour. Our forthcoming research aims to quantify the cost to the care industry of its acceptance of low-pay.   

But just as JRF’s founder, Joseph Rowntree, put his vision of a just society into action by designing New Earswick, a model village in York where people could live affordably and be part of a thriving local community, we also pursue social change through doing and demonstrating. Today, we do much of this through low cost social investment or grants made to organisations and/or individuals doing transformative and impactful work in support of our mission. This work has seeded initiatives like Fair by Design, which campaigns against the poverty premium and invests in innovative businesses helping to eradicate it, and supports organisations like BelleVie, which offer care workers autonomy and fair pay. 

Understanding care markets and worker experience

A multi-disciplinary collaboration between JRF’s policy and ideas, and social investment experts, has spent the last year working on how JRF’s funding can help transform the experiences of workers in care markets. We conducted, with Eastside People, a significant literature review to understand the dynamics of the 3 market segments: childcare, children's social care and adult social care, including the pay and conditions workers face, the finances and ownership of providers, and the policy and regulatory framework which underpinned the systems. 

It became clear that government underfunding, inadequate regulation and commissioning practices – underpinned by an undervaluation of care work - were exerting downward pressure on pay and perpetuating poor conditions for workers. The price of this poorly designed system is paid by workers. There are a range of solutions to these problems, many of which sit outside the control of providers and which JRF will continue to campaign on. 

And yet we also found that some providers were managing to pay workers at least the Real Living Wage and offering real benefits like paid training, wellbeing support, autonomy over work and control over shift patterns. We wanted to find out why – and explore how we might be able to support them.

Working with Social Finance and with an assembled Advisory Group of sector experts and funding and investment specialists, we embarked on a sustained period of scoping to better understand what ‘good’ looked like for workers in the sector, which providers were carrying out these practices, and the drivers which led them to buck the trend. We wanted to explore how JRF could help spread these practices throughout the industry.

A system which truly values and supports workers 

Looking at research and previous work in this area, including Unison’s Ethical Care Charter for local authorities, and speaking to experts and care workers themselves, we created a framework to set out what good outcomes for workers look like. This spans pay and benefits, working patterns, autonomy, governance, professional development and health and wellbeing, and represents real-world practices which some providers are following. The full framework is listed below.

We were looking to speak to providers who had implemented several of these policies, recognizing that firms would find universal adoption challenging in prevailing market conditions. In line with care worker feedback, the underpinning outcome was pay – at a minimum, providers should be paying workers the Real Living Wage or have a plan to do so in the near future. 

After a longlisting and shortlisting process, we identified a set of care providers across all 3 care markets which, despite challenging funding circumstances, found ways to value and support their workers through good pay and conditions. We asked them what their obstacles had been, and what they needed to do more – either to go further in their support for workers or to scale up their operations. 

We found that many saw good pay and conditions as a powerful force to recruit and retain workers in a time of high vacancy rates, or wanted to give more autonomy to workers to improve the quality of care, while others emphasized their values and said they wanted to run care provision in a more ethical way. 

Pay and benefits

• All workers paid the Real Living Wage.
• All workers covered by enhanced occupational sick pay.
• Travel time between domiciliary visits recompensed (for ASC).
• Transparent pay framework rewarding experience and development of new skills. 

Working patterns

• Zero hours contracts are not used instead of permanent contracts except when requested.
• Flexible working options as well as option of working full-time hours.
• Part-time staff able to choose number of hours with a guaranteed minimum number of hours. 

Autonomy

• Workers have formal channels to influence scheduling of their working hours and day.

Governance

• Workers are involved in governance and decision-making at the organisational level.
• Employees have the option to obtain a stake in the organisation (for example, through shares).

Professional development

• All workers receive high-quality and regular explore how internal training, and have opportunities to undertake funded specialised training.
• Workers supported in care progression, with clear routes into more senior management positions.
• Rates of staff turnover are low.

Health and wellbeing

• Providers have clear procedures to support employee mental and physical health.
• Providers have clear safeguarding procedures to follow up on staff concerns about client wellbeing.

What could we do next?

We have a generational opportunity in the care markets to do things differently – the government has promised a multi-billion pound expansion of childcare subsidies, while an ageing society demands a scaling up of the availability of paid care services to meet increasing and changing demand. Without contented and financially secure workers, the future of care provision looks precarious. 

We want to hasten the transition to a more just care system, with workers at its heart, and have been exploring how our capabilities and funding could best contribute. This could look like a fund to help providers who are treating workers well to scale up their operation and/or to pilot a new model which supports local providers and commissioners to prioritise workers’ needs in commissioning decisions. We will be speaking to experts, care workers and decision makers in this next phase of work – watch this space.