Unpaid working time
Unpaid working time takes many forms in homecare, including:
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Unpaid travel and waiting time of up to 60 minutes between visits, despite the fact this legally counts as payable working time
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Unpaid overtime when visit times are not long enough
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Unpaid engagement with management, often taking the form of support sessions, training and reviews
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Unpaid journeys to exchange essential PPE and paperwork
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Unpaid trips to pharmacies, shops, GP surgeries etc. outside of scheduled care visits
For low-income workers, this all adds up.
Unpaid travel and waiting time
Are you paid for gaps between scheduled care visits of up to 60 minutes? Mileage rate doesn't count. This is about payment for your time at work. An estimated 75% of homecare workers in England are not paid for this legal working time of up to 60 minutes between care visits. Once unpaid travel and waiting time is taken into account, a domiciliary care workers' true hourly rate of pay is always significantly lower than their contracted rate of pay. To remain compliant with the law, employers top-up their employees' pay so that their average hourly rate across the pay period in question meets the National Minimum Wage.
Often, the contracted hourly rates which appear on job adverts are therefore entirely misleading. This:
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contributes to poor retention rates in domiciliary care
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prevents the outside world from understanding the realities of low pay in domiciliary care
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undermines well-intentioned conversations about basic hourly rates of pay for direct care workers
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allows illegal underpayment of the National Minimum Wage by unscrupulous employers to go undetected
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makes it practically impossible for Health & Care Worker Visa holders to meet their minimum salary requirement without having to endure exploitative working hours
In 2020, ten homecare workers were awarded £10,000 each in backdated pay as a result of unpaid travel and waiting time, as it was found they had been illegally underpaid the National Minimum Wage. Unfortunately, this legal precedent did not prompt widespread change.
If a domiciliary care worker suspects they may have been illegally underpaid the National Minimum Wage as a result of unpaid working time, they may submit a complaint to HMRC. HMRC will then investigate accordingly.
However, very few domiciliary care workers are likely to report their concerns to HMRC. That is because:
1. There is a lack of awareness among domiciliary care workers about this issue
2. It is common for domiciliary care workers to be employed either via insecure zero-hours contracts, or via Health & Care Worker Visas. In both cases, employers are able to exert control over staff with the threat of reduced hours if staff are seen to 'step out of line' and, in the case of visa holders, the revocation of sponsorship, which could lead to deportation. This means people are only likely to report their employer if they are very confident their complaint will be upheld.
3. To be confident that a complaint will be upheld, an individual worker must have invested a significant amount of time into calculating their true hourly rate of pay. That is because HMRC bases its conclusion on a worker's average rate of pay across a whole pay period, which is commonly two weeks, sometimes longer. To work out the true hourly rate of pay for a single homecare run is complex and time-consuming (unless you have a calculator like ours). To do this calculation for every homecare run in a given pay period (the runs change all the time!), add them all up and find the average hourly rate is a totally unrealistic process for many domiciliary care workers. Consider that a typical working day starts at 7am and finishes at 10pm. Even if somebody really wanted to track their pay, it is unlikely they'd be able to find the time.
Homecare Voices has developed a True Hourly Pay Calculator to make it easier for homecare workers to understand the impact of unpaid travel and waiting time on their hourly rate of pay.
Unpaid overtime when visits are not long enough
One of the most common topics of conversation among members of Homecare Voices is how to respond when you are not given enough time to spend with one (or many) of the people you support.
There is usually zero flexibility in the scheduled visit times, despite the fact that as humans, we all have good days and slow days. When supporting someone who is living with a health condition like Parkinsons or dementia, this variability often becomes even more pronounced.
Many homecare workers are expected to order prescriptions, collect prescriptions, nip to the shops, liaise with other professionals like District Nurses and Occupational Therapists as necessary and perform other ad-hoc tasks as required. These time-consuming extras are not factored into scheduled visit times, and often cause us to unavoidably ‘run over’. If somebody needs urgent medical assistance, we must wait with them until a healthcare professional indicates it is safe for us to leave.
Generally speaking, all of those extra five or ten minutes go unpaid. If we regularly spend extra time with someone, most employers will be happy to add this time to our pay, but in the case of state-funded clients this often only happens once the local authority has been convinced of the need to increase an individual's care package, which can takes months or never happen at all. In the meantime, we go unpaid.
The majority of homecare agencies have now ‘gone digital’, meaning most homecare workers must now clock in and out of each care visit using an app on their phone. Unfortunately, members of Homecare Voices have reported that when clock in / out times show they spent less time than scheduled at a care visit, their pay is reduced accordingly, but when they spend additional time, they are not paid the extra. In this case it would appear that the rollout of time-tracking technology in domiciliary care is being used in a one-sided fashion. Yet, with clear data about the time we spend at care visits, in 2025 it should be possible to integrate this into payroll and care review systems.
Unpaid visits to and from the office
Many homecare workers must visit the office of their homecare agency on a regular basis to drop off completed paperwork, collect new paperwork and pick up PPE. These activities form an essential part of our role. Yet since many of us are only only paid for the time we spend face-to-face with the people we support (aka for contact-time only), these frequent visits are done in our own time, unpaid.
Unpaid mandatory training
ACAS clearly states that “if you earn the minimum wage or close to it, your employer should pay you for time spent on mandatory training. This is to make sure your pay does not go below the minimum wage when you're doing mandatory training”.
Yet many members of our community report not being paid for training their employer tells them is mandatory. You should be paid for the time it takes you to complete mandatory training regardless of whether it takes place online or in person.
Members of Homecare Voices call for:
All legal working time to be explicitly paid to domiciliary care workers, ending the practice whereby employers 'top up' wages to meet National Minimum Wage.
This would:
1. End the illegal underpayment of National Minimum Wage by unscrupulous homecare employers as a result of unpaid working time
2. Provide a starting point for productive conversations about low pay for homecare workers (if people think we are already paid circa £14/hour, they won't recognise an issue in the first place)
3. Improve retention in social by ensuring pay transparency for England's 644,000 homecare workers