Social care workers would need a 41% pay rise to achieve parity with their NHS equivalents, new research reveals.
A new report by the social care charity Community Integrated Care has measured the skill, complexity, and accountability of frontline support worker positions in social care and identified the salaries and benefits of counterpart positions in other sectors.
Unfair To Care – 2022/23 found that social care workers would need a 41% pay rise – equalling £8,036 – to have parity with their direct equivalents within the NHS (Band 3 Healthcare Assistants).
The average support worker in England receives a salary of £10.01 (outside of London) – 89p per hour below the Real Living Wage. Totalling at an annual salary of £19,573, support worker pay falls well short of the NHS Band 3 average take home ‘Total Pay’ of £27,609.
Teresa Exelby, chief people officer at Community Integrated Care, said: ‘This current system serves no one. It is entirely wrong that this sector has 165,000 vacancies on any given day – significantly impacting the quality of life of people who should, rightly, expect reliable support built upon consistent relationships.
‘The social care sector has real headroom to be an even greater force for good – changing lives at scale, offering greater efficiencies for public spending, and investing in local communities, but without a stable workforce, we are unable to seize this initiative.’
