500,000 people wait for social care. One in ten care posts are vacant. Many of the hundreds of food bank queues in Britain’s towns and cities will include some of the 1.5 million low-paid care workers, often on minimum wage – or even less with travel time and unpaid ‘sleep-in’ shifts.
But the government, led by the Tories, self-proclaimed party of ‘hard-working people’, has slashed money promised to tackle the social care staffing crisis. £500 million in 2021 has become £250 million less than two years later.
Social care needs investment, its workers need a real minimum wage of at least £15 an hour, rising with the cost of living. Social care also needs to be taken out of the hands of the privatisers who leech profit from our services, and be brought back into local authorities to be run democratically by workers and service users.
