Homecare Association response to zero hours consultation

The Homecare Association wants to see a valued care workforce with fair pay and working conditions. The main issues facing the homecare workforce are income insecurity and inadequate total earnings for hours worked. A hyper-fragmented market, zero-hours commissioning, and the purchase of homecare at below-cost fee rates for contact time only (often by the minute) prevent shift-based working and underlie these issues. Guaranteed hours legislation on its own will not address these problems.

In summary, we ask Government to:

• Redo the impact assessment - quantify the costs of the legislation to the NHS and local authorities and take account of the impact on people who fund their own care.
• Close the funding gap - invest at least £3.25 billion across the UK, so that the sector can comply with existing employment legislation.
• Reform commissioning - move from fragmented, by-the-minute purchasing to locality and lead-provider models and block contracts that guarantee providers a volume of work, so that providers can in turn guarantee careworkers' hours.
• Introduce a National Contract for Care - a statutory minimum price for homecare, drawing on our Minimum Price methodology, so that public bodies cannot buy care below the cost of lawful employment.
• Make commissioners pay for the changes they cause - require councils and the NHS to pay cancellation and movement charges, fund the rota changes that hospital admissions and discharges generate, and stop short-notice contract cancellations.
• Sequence commencement - bring the duty on commissioners into force ahead of, or alongside, the new worker rights.
• Adapt the mechanisms to the work - define how the provisions apply to runs of visits rather than shifts, recognise the block working patterns of live-in care, set reference periods, regularity tests and thresholds that reflect how providers actually deliver homecare, and apply exceptions, including where care work depends primarily on one individual.
• Regulate introductory agencies and review employment status - so that these reforms do not simply drive work into the unregulated part of the market, where careworkers have no protection at all and care regulation does not apply.

You can read our full response here and our supplementary submission here.