- Conference
- 2016 Community Service Group Conference
- Date
- 3 November 2015
- Decision
- Carried
The social care sector plays a vital role in Community. Not only are there over 320,000 workers employed in social care within the charity sector, but many more are employed by housing associations. Therefore the crisis in social care funding has a particularly far reaching and negative impact on members within Community.
This substantial reduction in funding for social care in the community and voluntary sector has seen grants and contract funding cut by £400 million since 2010/11 at the same time as service users with higher needs are taken on.
Some public sector contracts are so poorly funded that Community employers won’t bid for them. In other cases, money raised from the public by charities is used to subsidise underfunded public sector contracts. Many employers are struggling to financially survive.
These cuts are resulting in a lack of support for staff and undermining the quality of services they can offer their clients. Many establishments providing social care are not covered by the Care Quality Commission (CQC), but even where they are the requirements on staffing have been reduced in the new 2015 CQC standards.
But the biggest impacts for workers have been real-terms pay cuts, attacks on terms and conditions and staff reductions. These attacks on terms and conditions have seen sick pay cut, increments removed, higher-paying jobs removed through reorganisations and pension schemes “dumbed-down”. However the pay of senior executives is rarely affected in the same way.
This conference calls on the Community SGE to:
1) Continue to campaign to protect terms and conditions of Community members
2. Work with regions, branches with Community members, other service groups and external organisations to influence commissioners to properly fund contracts.
3. Promote the “Declaration of Interdependence” between the TUC and Children England which sets out quality commissioning practices for not-for-profit childrens’ services, and seek to extend this to other sectors.
4. Work with the NEC to campaign for adequate funding for social care services.