Care Show review
incredibly loyal to us and they’ve saved us many times over the years. We need them. So that’s what government really needs to be thinking about doing.”
Design challenges While there are undoubtedly many challenges facing social care, there are nonetheless plenty of new care homes springing up across the country – be it new build projects or refurbished existing homes. When I chatted with George Morris , director at architects Carless + Adams, I asked him if providers currently favoured one project type over the other. “It’s a really hot topic at the minute,” he
told me. “More and more, we’re going to sites where someone’s got an existing care home or an existing building they’re looking to utilise for care. If you knock down and build something new, you can always build a nice new purpose-built building that’s going to meet current standards and be fit for purpose. But, with the planning challenges and with funding, that’s not always the easiest option. Ultimately, we just need to find the right solution. So, we are seeing more and more renovations and extensions and trying to utilise existing stock and bring it up to the current standards, which is always a bit of a challenge, but that’s where we come in and try to make that work.” I asked George which sort of project he
preferred. “As architects, we always like a bit of a
design challenge,” he said. “New build is always preferable if you want to try and maximise a site and really give the best outcome. But that’s wishful thinking, and ultimately there’s also a good challenge we as designers see in existing stock and trying to make the most of spaces that probably
weren’t initially built for that purpose – trying to find the right solution that gets the right output at the end of the day. That’s the challenge that we take on and enjoy. So there’s not really a clear answer on that one. We like a bit of both – we’re happy to take part and enjoy the process either way.”
As well as Richard and George, I also
interviewed OneAdvanced’s vice president of social care Fran Kirke, apetito national account manager John Robinson, Christie & Co regional director Lee Howard, WashCo sales director James Holmes, Radar Healthcare quality consultant Emma Miles, and Russell Pillar, interiors consultant and director at Amara Hammond. My sincere thanks to everyone who spoke to me. All eight interviews can be viewed on our YouTube channel (scan the QR code at the end of this article).
Fair pay … in 2028 With the first day of the show more or less taken up by interviews, I took the opportunity on Day 2 to catch up with a
couple of keynotes. Of particular interest was the midday talk Government update: what will the fair pay agreement look like? by Tom Surrey, director of adult social care, workforce and policy for the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC). Unveiled at the end of September, the fair
pay agreement for care workers – ‘a major step in boosting the wages of adult social care workers across England’ according to the government – saw £500m being ringfenced for pay uplifts along with the promise of ‘a new body to negotiate changes to pay and terms and conditions for care workers’ and a slightly vague assurance that care workers can expect to see a ‘boost’ in their wages by 2028. According to Tom, the fair pair agreement
will be: “a national agreement that will set minimum pay and terms and conditions for workers in the adult social care sector.” “It’s going to be agreed through a process
of collective bargaining,” he continued. “Once that negotiation is completed and agreed, it will be the law, and it will apply to contracts automatically once those regulations that enabled it to have been laid in Parliament.” According to Tom, the government
recognises that care remains “a very low paid sector, and we know that feeds into challenges around recruitment and retention across the whole sector. We also know that this isn’t because employers want to pay their staff as little as possible – quite the opposite. In the conversations that we’ve been having over the last year, it’s very clear that there is great consensus between employers and employee representatives that increasing and improving pay and terms and conditions for workers in the sector is a common goal.” However, Tom recognised that pay cannot be the only focus. As Care England’s Richard
November 2025
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