Scotland must value carers as much as we value care

Imagine a world in which healthcare nurses are paid near minimum wage even when they work in the public sector. In the private sector, it’s even worse with some companies not even meeting their legal obligations. Nurses often have to travel between patients and have to fight to get paid while travelling.

Worse still, a massive amount of nursing isn’t done by trained and paid staff at all, but by friends and family members who make do with a pittance in government allowances which they can lose in an instant if they deign to try to work on the side or if the worst happens and they lose their patient. It is not unknown for an unpaid live-in-nurse to be made homeless because their status in the home was unofficial and the lease or deed was entirely in the name of their late patient.

This would be no way to run a valued health sector - and yet this is the reality for many who work in the care sector.

Carers do some of the most important work in our society and are working in one of the sectors that is rapidly growing as our society ages and care demands increase. Yet it is being reported today that care workers face “Dickensian” levels of low pay and high rates of poverty with 20% of workers in residential care homes reporting that they are living in poverty and 15% reporting that they are paid so little that their wages are topped up by Universal Credit (in effect creating a public sector subsidy for private company profits). Worse, private care companies recently featured prominently in a UK Government report naming and shaming companies who paid their workers below the legal minimum wage.

It’s no wonder that staff turnover is so high in the sector and that too many carers report a lack of training for their job. Two problems that have a common cause as companies reluctant to pay their staff enough to stay are also reluctant to pay to train staff who are likely to leave. Around 15%-19% of care staff in the public sector are likely to leave their post within any given recent calendar year. In the private sector, those rates increase to 22-27%. This presents a major drain on not just the ability to train staff to a high standard but for the entire organisation and the people they care for to benefit from the institutional knowledge that gets built up by high staff retention.

And the problem of lack of support for unpaid carers is similarly acute. This sector reportedly “saves” the Scottish public budget over £15 billion a year even accounting for the low wages paid to public sector care workers. A sum comparable to the annual NHS budget in Scotland.

This is no way to run a valued care sector.

While the Scottish Government is busy reorganising and centralising control over the National Health Service – a plan that Common Weal is deeply sceptical about – they have decided to almost entirely drop plans from last Parliament to reform the care sector. The National Care Sector should have been a plan to elevate care to the same level of prestige as the NHS is held but the Government's self-inflicted failure to enact those reforms have left carers in the same precarious place that prompted the call for reform.

Current plans to remove private profit from children’s care are still underdeveloped and the Government shows a reluctance to accept that their definition of “profit” is still far too narrow and would leave private companies too many opportunities to extract thousands of pounds every year from each child in their care.

It goes almost without saying that the logic behind the removal of profit from children’s care should extend to adult care too, but this is not a subject that the Government is ready to talk about at all.

Common Weal’s blueprint for a National Care Service would have created a sector that was entirely publicly-owned, run on a not-for-profit basis and would have been delivered locally rather than by the central diktat of Ministers. It remains our goal to create this system in Scotland. Let your MSPs know that until they are willing to make reforms of this scale to the care sector then they cannot claim to be valuing carers, or the people they care for.