Homecare Association response to consultation on Fair Pay Negotiations in Wales

The Homecare Association supports the Welsh Government's ambition to improve pay and conditions for the social care workforce, and we recognise the opportunity a Fair Pay Agreement represents — particularly for the predominantly female and ethnically diverse workforce who deliver care every day.

One overriding insight has guided our response: what care workers most need is not simply a higher headline pay rate, but security of total income — predictable, fairly paid hours covering all working time. Research published in March 2026 by Homecare Voices — a UK-wide worker-led organisation based on a survey of 511 current and former homecare workers — found employers pay 72% of workers for contact time only, with unpaid travel and waiting time meaning their true average hourly rate falls from a contracted £13.08 to just £9.61 per hour. Critically, 70% of workers identified payment for all working time as the most important factor for improving retention — ahead of higher basic pay, cited by 55%. This will undermine a Fair Pay Agreement that raises the nominal headline rate without addressing the underlying contact-time commissioning model from day one for the majority of the workforce.

This leads to our central argument: the SCNB, operating within its statutory remit under the 2025 Act, can negotiate pay and terms and conditions — and must do so effectively. But the SCNB is a necessary condition for improvement, not a sufficient one. The commissioning model in Wales — which, in some parts of Wales purchases care by the minute, fragments hours between an excessive number of providers, and fails to guarantee workers sufficient volume for compact rotas — structurally prevents providers from delivering income security regardless of what rate the SCNB negotiates. Reforming that model is beyond the statutory scope of the SCNB. It is a responsibility that falls squarely on Welsh Government, the National Office for Care and Support, and local commissioners — and it must run as a parallel workstream alongside the SCNB process, not after it.

Our response sets out two non-negotiable conditions for the Fair Pay Agreement to succeed:

• First, the Welsh Government must introduce a National Contract for Care Services — a compulsory minimum fee rate for commissioned care, calculated using an agreed methodology. Without this, providers will be legally obligated to deliver pay improvements that commissioners have not funded, repeating the failures of the Real Living Wage rollout.
• Second, Welsh Government and the National Office must launch an immediate parallel workstream to reform how the Welsh public sector commissions homecare — shifting from contact-time purchasing to shift-based purchasing and reducing hyper-fragmentation through neighbourhood-based zoning. The SCNB cannot deliver income security for workers if the commissioning system prevents providers from guaranteeing hours and paying for all working time. These are separate but inseparable conditions for success.

We also urge the Welsh Government to resource the employer side of the SCNB properly. Independent sector providers cannot absorb the cost of sustained participation in complex negotiations without dedicated support. Failing to resource employer representation risks producing an agreement that the organisations most affected by it cannot sustain.