The cost of living crisis continues to hit the headlines this week and care workers across the UK are struggling to cope with the rising costs.

A recent survey by UKHCA showed that 21% of homecare workers are leaving the sector for better-paid jobs with a more secure income.

Karolina Gerlich, CEO, The Care Workers’ Charity told CMM,
‘The current cost of living crisis is hitting our social care sector hard. Without funding increases to match the increased cost of groceries, fuel and energy bills our care workers often live hand to mouth and must seek support from organisations and charities such as ours to survive. With an already heavily strained workforce living with a still very real covid-19 pandemic after two years of struggle this is another blow to the industry.

‘Our crisis grants scheme supported 87 care workers totalling £44,555.00 in May with the cost of living including fuel to allow carers to travel to work, groceries to feed their families and bill payments to keep their homes warm and powered. It is a terrifying time for the sector with no real solution in sight.’

Figures from the data firm Experian Catalist show the average price of a litre of petrol at UK forecourts reached a record 182.3p on Wednesday 9th June. That was an increase of 1.6p compared with Tuesday, taking the average cost of filling a 55-litre family car to £100.27.

The vacancy rate in homecare is now 13.5%, which is the highest ever recorded, and there are currently 182,000 vacancies across the sector as a whole.

Although the focus in the media is on homecare, the cost of living crisis will bite hard for all social care workers, to include settings such as supported living and residential. As leaders and managers in the sector, it’s really important that we provide our teams with resources and support to help navigate through this. Please find attached an infographic, including top tips, and ways to save money during this time of uncertainty. We would like to encourage you to share this with your team, either electronically or physically.

If you would like to discuss the above, or about how we can collaborate, please let us know. To get in touch, email [email protected] or call us on 03305 552233.

As a specialist, family-run recruitment business, we provide a proactive and consultative approach to recruitment within Social Care. We help organisations to target issues such as continuity of staffing, reducing spend where you have a high volume of agency usage and supporting those who have specific talent requirements or are in hard to fill locations. We can help with any immediate staffing requirements or longer-term recruitment projects to ultimately save you time and money on agency spend.

Our customers tell us that we are their main stream of important information regarding the social care sector. We want to ensure the content we are sharing regularly is relevant and useful, so we would love to hear from you! What topics that you would like us to share next?