By Theresa Shearer

BEYOND the clapping and platitudes, how much are we as a society prepared to invest in a sector that is critical to the human rights and wellbeing of our citizens?

For years, social care has felt like the poor relation of the NHS, with the frontline workforce paid as little as £7.20 per hour in 2017, and a fully-funded living wage for every hour worked only secured – via determined campaigning – from April 2019.

As noted in Derek Feeley’s Independent Review of Adult Social Care in Scotland earlier this year, it is essential that we “shift the paradigm” and establish a new narrative on social care.

A new report published today – Scotland’s Care Sector: An Economic Driver – marks a significant step towards the new narrative by demonstrating that far from being a burden on the public finances, the social care sector contributes more than £5.1bn Gross Value Added (GVA) to the Scottish economy and supports some 300,000 jobs.

Commissioned by ENABLE Group from BiGGAR Economics, the report measures the sector’s direct economic impact at more than £3.3bn GVA, and its indirect economic impact (through supply chains and supporting industries) at a further £800m GVA.

Crucially, the induced impact of the sector (from employees spending their wages) is shown to generate an additional £1.1bn GVA.

It therefore stands to reason that raising pay for Scotland’s 148,000 frontline social care workers beyond living wage levels will provide a significant boost to the national economy more widely – generating additional tax revenues, reducing the need for in-work benefits, and enabling higher spending in the real economy.

So at ENABLE Scotland, we are moving immediately to raise the rate of pay for our frontline social care workforce to at least £10 per contracted hour from October 1.

This would take the minimum pay for ENABLE’s personal assistants to 50p above the real living wage rate of £9.50 per hour, and is equivalent to a 5.2% pay rise – worth more than £1,000 per year for a full-time care worker.

I have always viewed the living wage as the floor and not the ceiling for social care pay, and £10 per hour is not the end point either.

So we will launch demonstration sites paying £11 per hour to evidence the importance of higher pay in social care on the wellbeing, recruitment and retention of staff. The long-term sector-wide challenge, however, will only be fully resolved by Scottish Government action. We urge it to match our commitment to enhanced pay beyond the living wage.

Social care is not something that happens to other people; all of us and our close family members will likely need social care and support at some stage of our lives, so we each have an enlightened self-interest in getting this right.

As the population ages and expectations of truly human rights-driven, self-directed support rightly grow, the social care sector must no longer be viewed as some expensive burden, but as a thriving engine of inclusive, sustainable growth for the future Scottish economy.

Theresa Shearer is ENABLE Group CEO