Some care workers paid below minimum wage

Some care workers are being paid as little as £5 an hour – well below the legal minimum wage – according to a new report from independent think tank the Resolution Foundation, which describes the practice as a “national scandal”.

The study shows that while headline pay rates for care workers who visit clients at home are set at or above the national minimum wage of £6.19 an hour, in practice those workers often lose at least £1 an hour because they are not paid separately for the time spent travelling between appointments and because providing decent care often takes longer than the time allocated by the employer for each visit. This would mean that over the course of a year, a care worker who spent an average of 35 hours a week at work for 48 weeks would lose out on more than £1600.

There are an estimated two million care workers in the UK, 830,000 of whom are “domiciliary” care workers, carrying out home visits. It is estimated that up to 220,000 of all care workers may be paid less than the minimum wage. Last year HMRC, which is responsible for enforcing the minimum wage, served notices on 879 employers (in all sectors) advising them of underpayments to staff.

The report says that while breaches of the law are common, the enforcement regime for the national minimum wage puts the onus on workers to raise a complaint against their employer – something they are often unwilling to do.

At the same time the complex information on timesheets and payslips makes it difficult to be clear about the real hourly rate being paid. Yet the National Minimum Wage Regulations clearly state that travel time, excluding the first and last trip of the day, should be paid – except in the case of self-employed workers. The Resolution Foundation report also calls for stronger penalties for firms breaching the law on the minimum wage. The current maximum is a fine of just £5,000.

 

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