Pat Stack, Chair of the National Direct Payments Forum, talks about his role in creating Personal Assistant Employment Status: A Guide to Support Good Practice in this guest blog. You can hear more from Pat and the wider group involved in creating it at the launch webinar on 21st May 2026.
It is with great pleasure that I am taking part in the launch webinar for Personal Assistant Employment Status: A Guide to Support Good Practice next week. This guide has been a real team effort, involving key organisations and individuals coming together to produce a piece of work that has long been needed and long been in the making.
Why did we create the guide?
The National Direct Payments Forum has been aware of major issues concerning the employment status of Personal Assistants for many years. Indeed, we already did some joint work with HMRC to try and clarify the issue in the distant past.
So why did we take the issue so seriously, when often the response was ‘leave well alone’? For us, it revolved around putting the interests and safety of people who draw on care and support above all else.
Risky mistakes
When Direct Payments were first introduced, most Personal Assistants were considered to be PAYE employees. This usually meant that the Direct Payment recipient would need a payroll service, employer-employee contracts, employer liability insurance and so on. Support service input was often essential.
This started to change when some local authorities began encouraging self-employed PAs as a way to cut both bureaucracy and cost. Our initial dealings with HMRC all those years ago led to pretty clear guidance. They told us that, in many cases, these Personal Assistants actually didn’t fit the criteria for self-employment and should have been employees instead.
Although HMRC were unlikely to investigate individuals, they were nevertheless outlining a scenario in which Direct Payment recipients could be held liable for the mis-categorisation of their Personal Assistants. Furthermore, employment tribunals would most likely share the view that in most cases the Personal Assistant should not have been self-employed in the first place. This could lead to the Direct Payment recipient being penalised accordingly, potentially leaving them in serious debt.
A lose-lose situation
Whilst some local authorities continued to turn a blind eye to these issues, others responded by issuing a blanket ban on self-employed Personal Assistants altogether.
This created the worst possible outcome. On the one hand, Direct Payment recipients were being left vulnerable to legal challenge. On the other, the intended flexibility that was supposed to come with Direct Payment use was being denied. In neither instance were people’s individual situations and preferences being fully considered.
The issues became even more confused with the emergence of micro-providers and introductory agencies. While the former often did try and battle with the complexities, the latter too often just insisted that self-employment was fine – regardless of the reality of the relationship between the Direct Payment recipient and their Personal Assistant.
The need for clarity
As a result of all this, we, as a Forum, felt there was a real need to clarify these issues. We decided to go beyond the issues surrounding HMRC, and to broaden the scope to include obligations relating to the Care Quality Commission (CQC) and the Employment Agencies Standards (EAS) as well.
As a result of a series of consultations with these bodies and other key partners – including, crucially, the Low Income Tax Reform Group (LITRG) – the Forum produced a report in 2023. We called it ‘Personal Assist Employment Status: Getting It Right, Keeping It Legal, Protecting All.’ We followed up the report with a conference at the end of that year, and pledged to try and produce a guide around these issues.
This guide is a fulfilment of that promise. It was produced after much further consultation and discussion. Think Local Act Personal (TLAP) became centrally involved, and are now hosting the guide. LITRG again provided much expertise, and Community Catalysts and the Independent Living Group (ILG) came onboard too. The statutory bodies continued to play a key role, along with input from other interested parties.
A special thanks has to go to David Ashley, of the Forum and ILG, who spend many hours condensing and compositing the various findings and views as well as doing extensive research around the key issues.
There is no one-size-fits-all answer
It would be great to say that the guide provides a straightforward answer to many of the complex relationships involved in employment status and care arrangements. It can’t do that. Even with the statutory input there are no easy solutions.
What the guide does do is give good general advice and guidance which can be applied in many cases, but with the added advice that often the complexity of the cases may need a careful individual study. I hope that the guide will play a very important role in assisting correct conclusions. It can do this with the support of case studies, which can steer people in the right direction when looking at possible outcomes.
I believe that the guide can act as an important tool both to people who have Personal Assistants and to local authorities, in the process protecting the recipient by ensuring they are operating within compliance. It should also protect the legal employment rights of Personal Assistants and ensure an end to blanket bans and restrictions imposed.
Flexibility changes lives – let’s support it
I have worked in the field of Direct Payments for many years and still believe that they are the most effective way of providing independence, choice and control in the care and support environment.
Flexibility has always been key to that effectiveness, and the emergence of micro-providers and others looking to offer services has greatly added to that flexibility. There is still great scope to create imaginative care that best suits the individual, but we need to ensure that those using their Direct Payments for care arrangements are doing so in ways that are safe, legal and compliant. I hope and believe that this guide can become a key tool in this process.
It has felt like a very long journey to get here. Even so, the journey is far from over. Laws change frequently, and new care arrangements can create new challenges. We may not yet be at the beginning of the end, but I do think we have taken great strides to be at the end of the beginning.
Sign up to the launch webinar, or download the guide now.
