David Ellesmere on the Real Living Wage and health care

This year the new rate has been calculated at £10.90 an hour – a jump of £1 an hour or more than 10%.

That it has jumped so much in a year won’t come as a surprise to anyone.

Prices in the UK are increasing at the fastest rate in 40 years. Fuel, energy, food – everything is going up. We are in the middle of a Cost of Living Crisis which is having a negative effect on the living standards of all but the wealthiest of people in Britain.

If wages fail to keep pace with price rises, then millions of households are going to be much worse off.

David Ellesmere column looks at the real living wage,

Unfortunately, the Government’s own figures show that this is exactly what is going to happen. The gap between wage and price rises is forecast to make the average Ipswich family worse off by £1,700 over the next two years.

This makes the Living Wage Foundation’s campaign for higher wages more important than ever.

The Government has increased its own “National Living Wage” – really just a rebadged Minimum Wage – which is good news for people on low incomes, but it is still nearly 50p an hour lower than the Real Living Wage. This makes a huge difference when household budgets are tight.

The Government’s rate also only applies to people aged over 23. If you’re aged 21-22 then the rate is just £10.18 – but a pint of milk or loaf of bread isn’t any cheaper to buy just because you’re younger.

I’m really pleased that Ipswich Borough Council has been an accredited Living Wage employer for eight years – meaning that all our staff and all contractors providing direct services to the council are paid at least the Real Living Wage.

This is sadly not as common as it should be in local government. Ipswich is the only accredited Living Wage district council in Suffolk, and Norwich is the only one in Norfolk.

Ipswich and Norwich are also the only Labour-controlled councils in these two counties which is probably not a coincidence.

Councils need to be better on this. Nearly all pay their directly employed staff the Living Wage but fail on ensuring that suppliers of their outsourced services do too. It’s important that they start to address this. Their outsourced staff are just as important to the delivery of vital services as their directly employed workers.

We have only to look at the recruitment problems in social care to see where a race to bottom on wages ends up.

David Ellesmere in his column said to possibly fix the NHS without sorting social care. (Image: PA)

A significant proportion of residential and domiciliary care workers are paid at, or just above, the Government’s Minimum Wage. This is less than you can get paid for stacking shelves.

Now stacking shelves is an important job – we came to realise that during Covid. But how have we got to the point as a country where what should be the most important job in the world – looking after our loved ones when they become frail – is given such a lowly status that we pay the very least we can get away with?

Wouldn’t we want a carer looking after our mum or dad or grandma or grandad to be giving them their full attention rather than worrying about how they are going to be able to afford to heat their home or put food on the table for their children?

It’s hardly surprising that the sector is haemorrhaging staff. This year Suffolk County Council is actually predicting an underspend of £2.8m on its social care budget.

Not because people don’t need care, but because care providers in Suffolk can’t provide the staff to deliver the care packages the County Council had budgeted for.

This is having a terrible effect on the NHS. Because care packages can’t be provided, people who could be discharged from hospital are stuck taking up beds.

This means patients can’t be moved on to wards from A&E which leads to ambulances being stuck outside hospitals because their patients can’t be admitted. This leads to massive ambulance waiting times for even serious incidents like heart attacks and strokes.

Frail people not receiving the care they need are much more likely to experience a crisis requiring an emergency hospital admission, causing yet more pressure on the system.

After twelve years of being run by the Conservatives there are many things wrong with the NHS and Covid has made the situation much worse.

But it won’t be possible to fix the NHS without first sorting out social care and a good first step along that road would be to start paying all care staff at least the Real Living Wage.