Standards in elderly care could fall following the introduction of the National Living Wage for care workers unless the government is able to help plug the shortfall in funding, a think tank has warned.
The Resolution Foundation said over half of young workers have received a £7.20 an hour rate pay rise, even though it only legally applies to over 24-year-olds.
The study found no evidence of employers cutting back on shifts to finance the new wage rise and warned local authorities could use the excuse of higher wages to “ration” care services.
You mean that raising wages will lead to less labour being employed?
A quite astonishing result. We really ought to set up some sort of scientific study of these sorts of things. Such a pity we didn’t know this before, eh?
No, sorry. We’ve been told, quite explicitly, by all sorts of (lefty) think tanks, politicians, and randomly moronic Forbes commentators, that raising the minimum wage does not, under any circumstances, lead to fewer jobs or less working hours.
Especially for people at the marginal levels of skill – the young and poorly educated (and, with the USian bias of many of your Forbes commentators, the urban African American male.)
But this can’t be true – it says so in The Guardian:
Living wage has positive impact on care industry, research shows
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/aug/30/fears-over-minimum-wage-increase-in-social-care-industry
Though it does say:
The foundation admits that its analysis does not cover any job losses or non-compliance with the new minimum.
which is nice.
I love the assumption – cutbacks haven’t happened yet, but they might. Let’s increase the funding now before there is any evidence it’s required!
Private businesses facing the same problem? Crickets…
Also, if you can get away with that sort of writing (the article makes no sense) in a major daily, me apply position 🙂
That’s a very interesting concept: the idea that standards of care for the elderly in Britain can fall any lower. Lateral thinking, I call it.
Presumably the 12 minutes’ attention a bedbound nonagenarian receives each Monday morning from an obese Ghanaian woman who hates him will decrease to 9 minutes. That is, once the council has stolen the poor bastard’s bungalow.
A £7.20 pay *rise*? So, they’re now on £14? That’s more than I’m on.
Thomas, my grandmother was a victim of the zero standards of care for the elderly.
The NHS nurse would visit her several times a week but somehow managed to miss the huge open sores on her leg and backside (some of which were practically down to the bone). My gran being a typical ‘greatest generation’ never mentioned the pain she was in because she ‘didn’t want to cause a fuss’ until it became unbearable and she told my aunt. She was rushed to hospital where she never reovered and died slowly and painfully over 12 months. It was awful to see her deteriorate like that. It was that incompetent bitch of a NHS nurse’s job to check her for these sort of things but apparently she couldn’t be bothered. My uncle, a solicitor, sued the NHS to make sure her hospital care costs weren’t taken from her estate. She was 95 years old and before this happened had lived alone and totlly independently since her husband died in ’80, was fit as a fiddle too. Would have made 100 I’m sure if not for the grossly incompetent NHS. Best in the world my fucking arse.
Note: Standards have already fallen as a result of the last increase in the living (nee Minimum) wage.
This compounds a problem that’s been rattling on since 2008 (to my knowledge, born of involvement in providing care). The economics of care didn’t work well before, and now they are utterly borked.
The amount people can afford to pay (even with cashing in their home) is lower than the cost of all except the most basic care packages. If you want to live somewhere nice, you are looking at £1k per week (and that’s via charitable/state provision).
What Thomas Fuller and Dongguan John said. In spades.
The hapless Osborne suddenly discovered that all these breaks to employers were n’t showing up in any increased wages or effectual demand for more goods and services so instituted the NMW , which the employers reacted to as if it were the RED TERROR and started cutting the workers’ wages with their sophisticated management skills wot they lernt darn the pub.
The remedy is obvious : take more firms into common ownership so that the wages get out there ; any public sector management on this economic sabotage game, sack them. The Tories’ nicely, nicely approach to equate national demand with production, the single most demonstrable failure, though well -intentioned, of the Cam/ Osb dreamlike state has left no real alternatives.
Care is a hard thing.
Because apart from basic competence, you want people who do actually care. But there aren’t really any qualifications for that. Which means that ostensibly at least there’s an endless supply of people with the basic competence, so that pushes wages downwards. Yet at the same time you want to retain the ones who care, but if you pay them ‘too much’, you’re going to attract the ****s who don’t give a ****.
Maybe I’m overthinking this: is it really that hard to quality control for people actually caring?
I read somewhere that it would actually be cheaper to put old people on a cruise ship in the Med all year round (judging by John Square’s 1k a week, that sounds about right!).
Nurse,
DBC’s having a bad reaction to his meds, again.
@Ben S
“Maybe I’m overthinking this: is it really that hard to quality control for people actually caring?”
No, you aren’t overthinking it, and no, it’s not- it’s explicitly what the Care Quality Commission do.
The practical problem is that the people who do care largely can earn more (cost more) that’s the economics of care can pay in the current set up.
The practical problem is that the people who do care largely can earn more (cost more) that’s the economics of care can pay in the current set up.
Why, it’s almost as if human societies developed such that family members carried out this role rather than strangers paid for by the state.
@Tim N
… and I don’t think anyone is saying that’s not a better alternative (generally), I just think that provision of care to the old and dying- if it’s going to be done by the state- cannot be done without subsidy.
The discussion (in my mind) is more who subsidises and how, and what isn’t done as a result of the subsidy monies having been spent on care for the old.
Personally- if we are going to have to have Housing provided by the state, get those providers (Housing associations, especially) to solve the elderly care problem from their general housing surplus, and stop them trying to interfere with regular tenants lives.
Could this explain the disappearance of SMFS?