Think Local Act Personal’s National Market Development Forum commissioned Skills for Care to research with homecare providers the impact of contract arrangements on workforce measures like vacancies, turnover, sickness and pay rates.
This information was considered alongside Skills for Care workforce metrics collected through the National Minimum Dataset for Social Care.
The research covered homecare providers’ contract arrangements including contracted hours, fees and delivery; hourly rates of pay; and prevalent management cultures around practice, training and development.
The research did not find evidence of any clear correlation between any of the contract arrangements and workforce measures.
However, the research did identify that:
- increased fees are the main desired change identified by homecare providers, driven by a desire to increase staff wages and invest in training and development rather than a focus on bottom-line profit.
- local authorities as the main commissioner of homecare services in England tend to pay lower hourly fees and are less likely to have differential rates across the week compared to other commissioning groups.
- Individual employers now account for a sizable amount of the hours of homecare services commissioned and tend to pay higher hourly fees and differential rates at the weekend.
- Providers working with individual employers were found to use a higher proportion of fees to fund training and development activities for staff, compared to those received from other commissioners.
