Q&A – Professor Martin Green, Care England


Green: A proper approach to the workforce. Yes, they’ve announced a £500m workforce fund but that will not touch the sides in terms of the money needed to increase salaries as well as develop training and career pathways. We need a much clearer view about how


they properly reward the workforce and how they align the social care workforce with what people are paid in the NHS.


TCHE:Has the government not taken the need to professionalise the social care workforce on board?


Green: They have taken it on board to an extent and I’m a great fan of (England’s chief nurse for adult social care) Deborah Sturdy, who has done a huge amount in a really short time in that job. We have certainly got to improve the status of the social care workforce. But, frankly, the way you improve


people’s status is you pay them more. When I go to meetings with tables full of high- status people, their status is also linked to their pay. So it’s no good saying that we’re going to invest in the status of the social care workforce if you don’t pay them properly. The bottom line is the way to give the workforce the status they require and deserve is to pay them in alignment with NHS staff.


TCHE: Is that truly realistic?


Green: One of things I’m getting more and more annoyed about is - if that’s not going to happen – why do politicians keep opening their mouths about it? Why don’t they just keep their own counsel? If a politician says to me, ‘I want to improve the status of the social care workforce’, my response is, ‘Well, pay them properly and that would be job done’.


TCHE: Yet surely is it not for the government to set the wages of staff at private social care providers?


Green: Every GP is private and the government sets their wages quite happily. It is for the government. If the government is the major customer, and the government is saying it is part of an integrated health and social care system then, frankly, it is for the government to say that they should pay their wages. The government might not proscribe what you pay but they should pay a fee that allows you to have a proper approach to workforce pay.


January 2022 www.thecarehomeenvironment.com Another good example is the nursery


sector, where there are proscribed approaches to education, training, development and pay. So it’s not as if somehow it’s an impediment to them not doing it because they do it in other sectors.


TCHE: You represent some of the leading care providers. Is it for the government to set the pay of workers at, for example, Hallmark Care Homes?


Green: No, but it is for the government to say that if, for example, it pays for people in Hallmark services they should be paying


what they pay if you’re a private resident so that they could put the money into that service.


TCHE:The White Paper sets a target of 80 per cent of social care providers having a digitised care record that can connect to a shared care record by March 2024, up from 40 per cent now. Are you pleased with that?


Green: It really is excellent and I want to see far more use of technology right across the sector. We need technology that improves the quality of life and care for the resident and for the service user. But we also need lots of technology that makes it much more efficient, take away some of the routine and repetition for staff, give an audit trail for the regulator, and give data so we can develop some planning and long-term thinking. One of the challenges during the pandemic was at the start people were calling for data but there was very little of it. We have got to get both technology and data at the very centre of social care.


TCHE:Is the target ambitious enough?


Green: It is ambitious and it needs to be ambitious. We have got to get to a point where we are saying, ‘Look, this has got to be a technologically advanced and enabled sector’. The target is pretty ambitious but I want to be ambitious.


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