‘Government is supplementing my income, meanwhile a good portion of government money allocated to provide home care is simply ending up as corporate profit’

HOME care in Camden is delivered to service users (clients) by private companies.

These private companies are operating according to the regulatory and economic environment and parameters provided to them in law. It is a system that they did not create or determine the nature thereof. They simply have to function competitively in the environment which they have been presented with.

Home care workers who work for these private care agencies are “employed” on a “zero-hours” basis. This means that there are no guaranteed hours for carers and no job security.

And that every carer who is delivering home care to vulnerable clients in their homes in Camden, and who is employed in this inhuman and demoralising and systematically abusive manner, simply has no idea if they are going to have enough money at the end of every single month to live.

How this brutal reality impacts service users / clients is complex and far-reaching. Home care work is quite simply the lowest paid job that one can find (see below) and therefore it is the easiest job to get.

This means that very many carers are transient, temporary, and uninterested in the work or the learning required to become competent.

When such a worker finds a better job they will often simply abandon their care job in the middle of the day and without any notification or further contact with their former “employer”

This is a very unfortunate aspect of the service that we are providing in Camden to our most vulnerable.

For a home care worker “zero hours” means the carer is paid only for the time for any given care visit, 30 minutes, one hour + per visit, etc, but that they are not paid for the time it takes to travel to and from the visit; and they are only paid for visit time and not for any “gaps” in their work roster.

And it means that in the middle of the day a carer might have several hours spread through their day with no work. Since it is not possible to deliver home care without travelling to and from the home in question, clearly travel time is a part of the work that remains unpaid.

In my case I have informed my company that I am available for 47 hours per week. In my several years of working for this company, they have consistently allocated to me 25 to 30 hours per week care visits (paid work) in the logistical space that 47 hours’ availability allows.

But for many practical reasons more hours are not often possible to allocate, and accounting for the unpaid working / travel time, is a significant factor in this.

I am “working” for 47 hours per week and I am paid for 30. I am paid £12 per hour “worked”. So 12 x 30 equals £360 per week earned, and now one must divide £360 by 47 hours availability / travel time, or £7.65 per hour actual earnings. So in a good month I am earning £7.65 per hour in 2023 as a front-line hero of the pandemic who people were applauding.

I do not believe that any reasonable person can consider this manner of compensation for home carers, working with our most vulnerable citizens and tasked with supporting their sense of wellbeing and quality of life, does any justice to those vulnerable people or represents a sincere interest on the part of authority for their wellbeing.

A home carer who might have cared for a person for several years during the final phase of their life, and be visiting that person two or three times a day, five, six, or seven days per week, for a total of 10+ hours per week visit time, will discover that when that person passes away, or moves to a care home, the reward to the carer for the consistent and long-term good service that the carer has delivered to the deceased / departed client, is that the carer has “lost” 10+ hours work per week.

These hours can take weeks or months (up to six months in my experience) to be replaced with new work due to inevitable logistical factors.

One is simply rewarded for providing consistent, reliable service to a client, with a giant cut in income and the insecurity and the demoralisation such involves is hardly contributing to the development of a safe environment for clients. It is putting them at risk consistently and chronically.

This is not rocket science. If care workers are not allowed to work with security and dignity, is it reasonable to expect that they will be able to reliably provide security and dignity to the service users? Carers are being indoctrinated into a world of work where their life and work has no value and this indoctrination – and the hypocrisy which it involves – is not inculcating into them a sense that the clients’ lives have value. The clients are suffering because of this failure.

Money allocated for providing home care is ending up as corporate “profit”, when it would be better used to improve the service. I hope readers can be aware of this gigantic moral failure on the part of authority in this matter.

I recently discovered that I am entitled to universal credit because of my low income, and I am now claiming it (I am going to get £300 benefit this month alone as I should have for many years). I am working 47 hours per week as a home care worker.

Government is supplementing my income, meanwhile a good portion of government money allocated to provide home care is simply ending up as corporate profit.

This is a disaster for our most vulnerable citizens and I want the readers of this great newspaper to be aware of it.

NAME WITHHELD
(“I am happy to have any kind of a job and I don’t want to put that in danger. I am frightened.”)