Reacting to the report, United Response’s Public Affairs and Policy Lead Ali Gunn said:

“The Unfair to Care report lays bare the unfair, unequal, and fundamentally insecure working conditions that social care workers continue to face in post-pandemic Britain.

“We all know that a major pay gap exists between social care workers and NHS staff carrying out similar roles, but it’s so often reduced to statistics and abstract figures. It’s truly astounding to consider that it would take an entire generation – 23 years, according to the report – for social care workers to achieve pay parity with their NHS equivalents. An £8,000 pay gap has real, human consequences for retaining and upskilling a full-time, professional workforce in a sector that contributed over £58 billion to the UK’s economy last year.

“United Response has been warning the government for years about this and the real-term damage to our wider health and social care system arising from their chronic inaction. Staff vacancies in adult social care homes are up a record 52% this year according to Skills for Care research, and the recent Cordis Bright Report into the Market Oversight group found agency use up by 150% – dangerous levels of spending for a sector that is facing a £4 billion funding gap.

“Central government funding been neither consistent nor kept pace with increasing demands on social care providers over the past decade. As we highlighted during our Autumn Statement analysis, the government’s recent £7.5 billion pledge for social care over the next two years is a short-term solution that offers little in the way of fixing what are long-term problems around pay inequality and insecure working conditions.

“Our message to Steve Barclay MP is clear: pay parity between social care workers and NHS staff should be your priority for 2023. The adult social care sector is united is our calls for a national workforce strategy to be urgently developed and implemented; one that explicitly commits to benchmarking the minimum pay rate for social care workers to NHS Band 3 (currently £10.40) and to funding its introduction from April 2023.”