This report in the Guardian is shocking:
Cuts in council funding mean that rising numbers of care firms are having to break the law by employing workers at below the minimum wage, the head of the Low Pay Commission has warned.
David Norgrove told the Guardian that councils were sometimes dramatically slashing the rates that they paid care companies to wash, feed and dress the elderly and frail; and this was happening so fast that the firms concerned were using ruses to get round the £6.31-an-hour minimum pay rate.
The explanation is clear:
Heather Wakefield, Unison's head of local government, said: "The government have made such swingeing cuts to council grants that forces social care providers into cutting pay and conditions. Many employees are now being paid below the minimum wage. That's because they are not being paid for travel time, use their own cars without being paid reasonable mileage rates and have to pay for mobile phones and uniforms."
It's what happens next that needs to be known.
Firstly, we have to know if HMRC will proactively pursue these companies for breach of the minimum wage. If not, why not? HMRC cannot turn a blind eye to such abuse in my opinion.
Secondly, we have to ask why it is that in one of the richest countries in the world this happens. How can we abuse those providing an essential public service to the vulnerable in this way - in the process telling all involved we do not value them. What does that say about our society?
Third, and as importantly, we have to ask why out-sourcing is allowed to cover this abuse.
What this practice represents is a sickness at the heart of the UK. The elderly deserve better. Those who care for them deserve better. We deserve better of our politicians, government and local government. And we need a business sector that does not abuse in this way if society is to survive as a coherent force that holds us together in community.
Right now is it surprising that people believe in the integrity of none of these groups?
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
A dreaded typo, Richard. I think you mean lost (not left).
Thanks!
Early morning typing
Well, actually, just typing in my case
“We deserve better of our politicians, government and local government.”
I suspect you’ll be waiting for quite some time Mr. M.
The more I hear of the depredations of this appalling sham of a Government – a Viking raid disguised as St Augustine’s mission to “civilize” this island – the more I hear the words Tacitus puts in the mouth of the leader of the British opposition to the Roman invaders: “ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.”, which translates as “where they make a desert they call it peace.”
Indeed, the FULL sentence is even more apt, given the horrors of ATOS and Ian Duncan “Eeichman” Smith:
“Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium; atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.”
which translates (using the Loeb Classical Library translation):
“They plunder, they slaughter, and they steal: this they falsely name Empire, and where they make a wasteland, they call it peace.”
This is the true epitaph (would that it were!) on this deceitful, cruel and corrupt Government.
Well said Andrew. By rights this Government should have foundered on its gross incompetence, its vilification of the poor, and utterly sickening condescension towards the populace. What we need to ask is WHY this hasn’t happened and WHY the populace 9at least a third of it) swallows their guff like hot cakes. The lack of robust opposition (Labour cannot be forgiven for this) is one element as well as a populace benumbed, benighted and cowering in fear. A tired, apathetic, dumbed down culture sleepwalking into oligarchy.
Seldom has a more accurate description been taken from history, Andrew. But in many ways even that fails to cover the sheer magnitude of the cruelty and barbarism being enacted (still) in the name of austerity – there are simply so many examples.
The situation this blog covers is actually being pretty well covered (at last), with a feature on C4 News last week, and a related dimension of these employment practices in a Dispatches on Monday.
But the persecution of sick and disabled people – for that is what it is – is much less reported, now that the halo effect from the para olympics has well and truly faded. There are major changes to mobility allowance about to be implemented which will have a profound impact on many thousands of people. But perhaps the most rank example of this persecution I’ve heard of so far was reported in Private Eye (No.1350, 17th Oct).
This concerns appeals against the assessments handed out by ATOS – which tend to be wrong in up to 40% of the cases. I quote:
‘Under the Welfare Reform Act 2012, from the end of this month [October] the right to an immediate appeal of any decision over entitlement to employment and support allowance (ESA) will cease, as the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) will be obliged to review any contested cases.
It sounds like a sensible way to save taxpayers millions by avoiding the costs of contested tribunals. But from the moment a sick or disabled benefit claimant asks the DWP to review a case, Duncan Smith intends to halt their ESA payments immediately. With no time limit to reviews, many could be left penniless for weeks or months. Currently those waiting for an appeal – sometimes up to a year – are usually paid ESA at the assessment rate of £71.70pw for a single person. Under the new proposals, the only option will be to apply for Job Seekers Allowance (JSA). But to qualify for that they must be fit and available for work, and many are genuinely not.
Furthermore, when disability benefits are halted it has a knock-on effect on housing and council tax benefits…’
So here we have yet another example of something that has become a hallmark of the ConDem government’s approach to public policy. Identify a dimension that can be presented in a positive way (in this case saving taxpayers money by removing the cost of tribunals) and then add in conditions and clauses that deliver the real intent of the policy. In this case deterring people from appealing the ATOS system so that by the time we are in the run up to the next election IDS can claim that the reducing number of appeals shows the system is working, while simultaneously forcing them off ESA.
As a student of government and public administration, what I find particularly shocking about developments such as this is that the negative impact many policies such as this one will have on people are so obvious (as opposed to an unintended consequence) that I can only conclude they are intentional. That strongly suggests that within DWP there is now a cohort of civil servants and advisers whose primary task it is to formulate policy which is specifically designed to cause mental and physical hurt to a large number of vulnerable people. That is a truly shocking indictment of what the purpose of so much of government has become since May 2010.
“That strongly suggests that within DWP there is now a cohort of civil servants and advisers whose primary task it is to formulate policy which is specifically designed to cause mental and physical hurt to a large number of vulnerable people.”
No, they are Crown Servants doing what their political Masters and Mistresses tell them to do. Their job is not to make policy (any more than it is the job of the Police or HM Forces make policy) – their job is to be the instruments of that policy.
Respectfully, elected representatives make the policy.
In the same way that if a Red-Yellow Mob gets in and demands even tighter Green Regulations – regardless of the impact on jobs – Crown Servants in Whitehall will deliver the policy of the Minister.
Government has never been a ‘bloc’, it is in essence a confederation of tribes in which warfare breaks out from time to time – thus sometimes the NHS / Welfare gets more cash, sometimes less regardless of the realities on the ground.
Don’t forget the MoD sent troops off – on the orders of the politicians – whilst also knowing that the troops were never going to be fully equipped. Even before the second Gulf War, contracts for kit weren’t signed (even though they needed to be) because if HMG had done so, it would have destroyed the fiction that going to war was the last possible action….
Governments are by definition cynical and full of the capability of doing harm – each tribal govt. tries to placate it’s own ‘tribe of voters’ whilst kicking the ‘enemy’ and ‘shaking it about a bit’ to try and attract the undecided.
I suspect and hope Ivan might answer this
Your assumption is, in my view, naive
Civil servants are not, these days, politically neutral, if they ever have been. And the process of government has been captrured via secondment, consultation and lobbying so that civil servants rarely move without seeking private sector approval first
Hence the naivete of your opinion which reflects a wish, not a reality
As opposed to the Red Mob who threw the doors open to all and sundry…the net result being of course mass unemployment for unskilled Brits and the depression in wages….especially at the bottom end.
Neither Blue nor Red actually represent the working man or woman. On another website I wrote,
“At a recent conference the CotE said he did not see the emergence of millions of educated but very cheap workers from India and China as a threat……
…..of course to business nothing could be nicer, they adore cheap, educated labour that someone else has paid to educate and keep healthy…..
….what the Boy George forgot is that millions of very cheap workers are a huge threat to the well being of the UK worker…..
….to pretend otherwise is foolish….look at the millions of jobs that have gone off-shore over the years to cheap workers, leaving UK subjects unemployed or trying to live on wages that require tax-payer top-up.”
Allan, your comments regarding the nature and function of a good number of 21st century civil servants is not accurate, I’m afraid. Just to be clear, however, I’m not suggesting that a large numbers of civil servants don’t seek to be – and are able to maintain – political neutrality in what they do. But significant numbers are nowadays not of that ilk, and are, to be fair to them, not expected to be so. This is in the main due to the fact that the “career” civil servant – which is what I think you are alluding to in your comment – is no longer the only type of civil servant in government, and hasn’t been since the Fulton Committee recommended ‘…an expanded late entry, temporary appointments for fixed periods, short-term interchanges of staff and freer movement out of the Service.’ (1968, recommendation 11).
I’ve commented before on the extent to which I think the principle and intent of this recommendation has been corrupted since the 1980s. But the result is that there are three variants of civil servant: what we might best call traditional or” true” civil servants, whose role is expected to be “neutral’; political advisers, whose function and role is certainly not “neutral”; and secondees, often with specific roles but whose agendas and political “neutrality” is often highly questionable. Finally, we also have to factor into this mix the effect that extended periods of secondment into a variety of commercial entities – such as banking and finance houses – might have on the “neutrality” of the senior civil servants who tread that particular path, and who may wish to do so again once their tenure as civil servants comes to an end. When all of these elements are mixed together its seems to me to be pretty difficult to conclude other than that sections – perhaps large sections – of today’s civil service are not only politicised but also ideologically compromised.
Finally, I also have to dispute your claim that politicians make policy. It may well be that in certain circumstances politicians arrive in government with pretty well formulated policies, which have been worked up while in opposition, usually by a group of secondees and advisers and perhaps in conjunction with politicians. I have no doubt that several members of the current government benefitted from that situation when they came into government in 2010, as did some of Blair’s ministers in 1997.
But as the current shambles within the government over energy prices (and now environmental issues) shows, all government ministers are usually able to do is voice their views about what direction policy should head in (as Cameron did yesterday). Once they’ve done that it will be civil servants (of whatever category) who are tasked with researching and formulating policy – perhaps with regular input from a minister if they are of the hands-on variety, as some are – and dealing with implementation. So I suppose if we want to split hairs on this we can say that politicians “make” policy, in the sense that they initiate it and sign off the final draft bill or measure, but the actual making – and therefore much of the detail that gets into a policy, and thus, to a greater or lesser extent its operation and impact, is the work of the various categories of civil servant.
I don’t want to sound too picky but whatever IDS is, he isn’t a Nazi mass-murderer.
Like it or not, he was democratically elected to the HoC. Quite whether we have the right system for such elections is of course another matter.
@Allan – you obviously took offence at my use of the phrase: “given the horrors of ATOS and Ian Duncan “Eichman”
I have to confess that I pondered long about using that analogy and applying the epithet, but then, when considering articles such as this (from the Daily Mail, no less!!)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2102484/This-wartime-Nazi-Germany-Camerons-attacks-vulnerable-needy-stopped.html
and this
http://kittysjones.wordpress.com/2012/10/15/are-the-tories-simply-out-of-touch/
(both of which, incidentally, are supported by Ivan Horrocks’s post on this Blog item (I quote “But the persecution of sick and disabled people — for that is what it is — is much less reported, now that the halo effect from the para olympics has well and truly faded.”)), I decided to go ahead and use it, advisedly.
As regards your point that IDS is a democratically elected member of the House of Commons – alas, Hitler was a democratically elected member of the Reichstag, as were most of the Nazi members of his Cabinet, and Hitler himself was a lawfully appointed Chancellor! Legality is often miles away from morality, as Richard has often made clear.
One final point – on a different matter – I can confirm, from my experience as an elected member of a London Borough, occupying the Chair of a significant Committee (the Economic Development Committee) that most of the work was done by my officers – I gave them a steer, and often some quite clear directions, but in the end the policy of the Council was strongly officer-managed, though not fully officer-led. What Ivan says on this point tallies with my experience.
“Like it or not, he was democratically elected to the HoC.”
Was he? If I remember rightly, of it wasn’t for the Lib Dem’s cosying up to them, the whole lot of ’em would have been on the opposition benches. They got in by dint of the Lib Dems teaming up with them to provide a workable majority, not because the populace voted them in!
More evidence of a world of values turned on their head. How did we end up in a situation where the most vital services are so undervalued? The least productive are rewarded massively and the most needed are virtual slaves.
Haven’t they always been undervalued? My mother was a nurse before the NHS came into being. She was never well paid. I used to be a teacher. Inever went into teaching because of the pay, although it’s much better now.
This problem has been known about for a long time. I think it is not very well publicised because all the groups who campaign on low pay tend to work against rather than with each other. Groups such as False Economy, We Are Spartacus,Keep Our NHS Public,Open Democracy, etc. need to get together to get their message across while they still can, before the lobbying bill stops them talking to anyone, let alone each other.
I agree there has always been underpayment
But of this order, no
I was responding to Simon who used the word “undervalued”, not always the same as underpaid, although in this case it is both.
My mother was a nurse, my father was a bus driver, and they applied for clothing grants for me to go to grammar school in the 60s. My mother, as a nurse in an NHS hospital, was sent to nurse rich old people in their own homes in the 50s.
Yesterday the 20m. rule was upheld for those getting the mobility component of the DLA. It, too, was passed quite easily even though most of the comments to the government supported the previous 50m. rule. It basically means that thousands of people who at present have Motability cars will have them taken away along with their blue badges.
I know this because I looked at the We are Spartacus website, but can find no record of it anywhere else.
Another sign of the government not caring about those living in poverty, whether disabled, working, or non-working.
Agreed
That would also hit car manufacturers and dealers then…quite heavily as well. Not forgetting insurance.
The scandal of reducing care worker’s pay
HMRC have said they are looking at this sector. However HMRC can only get these workers NMW. Most should have contractual rights to more say £6.40, £6.70 per hour. By refusing to count all the hours the companies are pushing these workers back down towards NMW.
This is where we really must shout about the resources HMRC need. HMRC make their £8 million for NMW enforcement go a long way, but the volume of work this situation causes is potentially overwhelming. The companies claim their pay of say £6.70 per hour for the minutes inside the customer’s house will exceed £6.31 for the NMW hours including travelling time. You need a separate calculation for every day for every worker to calculate how much if anything is underpaid!
Please keep highlighting this.