- Conference
- 2008 National Delegate Conference
- Date
- 31 May 2008
- Decision
- Carried
Conference notes:
1)composite E passed at 2007 National Delegate Conference of UNISON, regarding Home Care;
2)that despite the sentiments of this motion, the Employers and Government have accelerated the drive to privatise and destroy publicly provided health and social care services;
3)this has led to the undermining of conditions and pay for a predominately (and already low paid) female workforce under the guise of a “User Choice” philosophy;
4)the personalisation of social care agenda being pursued by government will actually lead to deterioration in both quality and choice for service users, and will ultimately drive down standards of care.
Conference recognises the continuing trend to privatise local authority Home Care services. The reason for this is simply to reduce costs by cutting labour costs involved. This represents a constant attack on many thousands of UNISON local authority home care members and must be resisted at every opportunity.
Staff in private organisation are often less effectively trained than in-house local authority carers, leading to a continuing deterioration in the quality of service provided to the most vulnerable members of the community – older people, disabled people, mental health survivors, those with addiction problems and vulnerable families.
Conference therefore calls on the National Executive Council to:
a)step up its campaign against the privatisation of Home Care services;
b)develop and strengthen the campaign launched last year to promote publicly provided Home Care Services;
c)initiate a determined strategy to counter, head on, the inefficiency and over-charging of the private sector, and liaise with appropriate bodes to monitor care given by the independent sector to reveal the extent of the decrease in standards of care to service users;
d)encourage government to put integrated, in-house home care services and a fairly paid, well-trained workforce at the heart of its strategy for responding to the needs of an ageing population;
e)demand that government introduces a regulatory framework to ensure all health & social care workers are given regular training and proper support, to ensure the highest standards are maintained, and that this is equally applied to workers employed by service users under Direct Payments/Individualised Budgets. Furthermore, the union needs to demand that workers employed under DP/IB are registered, regulated and police checked in line with all other health and social care workers;
f)support branches and members to build effective, imaginative campaigning coalitions with care users, local communities and other appropriate allies.