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“Extra Strong Mints are the best things to get rid of the smell of poo and sick,” I was told matter-of-factly by a fellow care worker. That afternoon, as I cleaned up diarrhea and changed a catheter it struck me just what an unrelenting job it is to be a social carer.
Most care workers simply get on with this sort of thing. It is a basic part of the job, a bit like turning on the computer is for me as a writer. And besides, you don’t have time to dwell on feelings of discomfort or even nausea: the next client is invariably waiting.
The reality of the social care sector was aptly summed up to me by a fellow carer, who told me she felt like a “glorified cleaner”. This was not meant to be disrespectful towards cleaners. Rather, it was a pithy judgement on the way in which care workers – on whom thousands of vulnerable people rely for their most basic and intimate needs – are rewarded and remunerated for the work they do.
It is quite easy to get a job as a carer – something I did as part of the research for my book, Hired – because few people stick around in the job for long. The turnover rate in the social care sector is 25%, compared to a UK average for all jobs of 15%. The figure is even higher in the private care sector and among home care workers, where around 300,000 people leave their positions every year.
According to a new report by the IPPR think tank, England faces a stark shortage of 350,000 care workers by the year 2025. Should freedom of movement end after Brexit, that figure could reach 400,000.
Crucially, the report notes that “chronic underfunding” of care, together with a “dysfunctional” social care system, has resulted in outsourced providers competing to minimise wage costs in a race to the bottom. With council budgets being cut by as much as 50% since 2010, there is less money with which to fund the private companies that are contracted to provide care, meaning wages are kept low. The IPPR report estimates that increasing social care wages to a living wage could cost the public purse as much as half a billion a year.
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