Scandalous decision not to give pay rise to home care workers in independent sector
by Nicola Grant – Regional Spokesperson of The Workers Party
The Health Minister's announcement that home care workers in the independent sector will not receive a pay increase is a scandal. Staff who work for the private sector are low paid and have inferior terms and conditions of service, which is why private care companies cannot recruit or retain staff. It is the responsibility of the independent providers to pay a real living wage as employers, but they won’t do that without regulation and oversight by the state.
This issue once again highlights that home care services were privatised not to provide a better service but a cheaper one in order to balance the books. Academic Sara Farris and colleagues recently noted that “over the past 30 years, large private companies owned by investment funds have become highly influential as providers of care homes, as well as childcare places”.
This increasing ownership of providers by financial concerns can also be seen in relation to home care provision. In Northern Ireland, for example, in January 2025 private equity fund BGF announced that it had purchased a minority stake in Connected Health, a prominent local private homecare provider. BGF (formerly the Business Growth Fund) an ‘investment adviser’ with a £2.5 billion portfolio, which it uses to “scale up companies with good growth prospects”. You have to wonder where those billions came from and how much of the scaling up involves wage increases for the people actually doing the work.
Farris and her colleagues note that “private investors have reaped huge returns by restructuring care companies in their interests. Meanwhile, many people who rely on care confront high fees and low-quality services. Others struggle to access care altogether as provision becomes increasingly uneven, with services closing in diverse working-class areas, or shutting their doors to publicly funded users. Furthermore, the workforce endures poor wages and heavy workloads in often understaffed facilities.”
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Those vulnerable people who rely on the service and those workers who provide it are the real losers. Millions of pounds in public funding is paid to independent providers, but it doesn’t go on staff wages or terms and conditions of service. It goes on profits to the companies their directors and shareholders.
The Workers Party has been campaigning for well over a decade to bring the home care service back into the health service. Much of the crisis in our hospitals can be traced back to the decision to privatise this vital service.
Overwhelmed and overflowing emergency departments occur because patients cannot be discharged from hospital and beds become blocked at ward level which permeates throughout the system This is due to the lack of home care packages, and related to the inability of private providers to recruit and retain staff because their profit model and connection with vulture private equity firms means they are unwilling to pay a real living wage and sufficient terms and conditions of employment.
The Workers Party want to see these staff receive proper remuneration for the important work they carry out but have no confidence that any increase to the sector would go towards a living wage for the staff.
It is right that the minister acknowledges that these staff are providing frontline care for people in their own homes and it is for those reasons that this key service should never have been privatised. Senior management and political parties knew that this was a low wage sector when they handed 80% of the service to independent providers but were unconcerned about the staff “who were and still are predominantly women” because they were working to their own agendas.
Farris et al note that in both childcare and homecare provision in the UK, “ the majority of provision is run by for-profit companies. Many of the largest companies are owned by investment funds, especially private equity firms. Their financial strategies can undermine the stability and quality of care services, obscure how funds are used and contribute to downwards pressure on pay and conditions for the (mostly female) workforce.”
If the minister is really concerned about the plight of these workers he should bring them back into the public sector where they belong. The home care service was once the corner stone of the National Health Service, and it should become so again.
November 17th 2025