Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Yet another Sevacare scandal in which our Council is implicated in paying half the minimum wage
BBC: 'Seventeen care workers are alleging failure to be paid the minimum ....'
Some of the care workers involved in the tribunal (BBC Photo): 
Guardian: 'Payslips show that contractor Sevacare paid London borough of Harin...'
Guardian: A spokesman for Haringey said the council contractually requires providers to obey minimum wage law, including remuneration for travel time.
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Tags for Forum Posts: Haringey Council, Unison, carers, minimum wage
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Antoinette on
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I was just reading about that myself. This is the BBC News item - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-37350750
Shocking isn't it. One line that stuck out for me as well was this one:
"Ms Henry visited all of her clients by bus. But there were some days, she says, when she spent more time trying to get to her clients than caring for them - she could spend seven hours travelling each day and not be paid for it."
So snarled up traffic does have very real consequences.
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Permalink Reply by John McMullan on
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More roads!!!!
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Or make them all ride bikes....yes?
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I'm just all for more road building so that bus and car journey times can be improved. Who knows you may be able to just drive everywhere instead of having to use the bus if we build enough roads.
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The question is just where? There's no space and i personally wouldn't want green space taken away. Just get on bikes, especially for rides within the borough, a la 'call the midwife'. I'm a social worker and did this.
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I understand that "commuting" doesn't count in your hours, it is also heavily subsidised by the government. However it beggars belief that scummy people like this were bidding for contracts under the assumption that they did not have to pay their staff's travel time whilst on the job. This is a massive loophole that needs to be closed by the government, it's not like it's hard.
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It's not about commuting - it's about travelling from service user to service user. But I agree with you - it's primarily in the agency's responsibility.
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exactly! these people are not paid for travel time. if they were paid, it'd not matter how many hours a day they spend in traveling from home to their client's addresses.
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Permalink Reply by HoL Site Admin on
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The following statement has been issued by Haringey Council:
Cllr Jason Arthur, Cabinet Member for Finance and Health, said:
It is shocking and unacceptable to hear that Sevacare is not paying its carers minimum wage.
Just to be clear, Haringey Council paid Sevacare enough money through contract fees to ensure that all live-in carers could receive not only national minimum wage but national living wage for the 24-hour care they provide.
We had already terminated our relationship with Sevacare after reporting our concerns about the quality of care provided to the CQC.
We will now be following this up with the CQC given the implication that this practice is not confined to Haringey, but is nationwide.
Carers do a fantastic job and it is vital that they are paid sufficiently to recognise the vital work that they do. While we have robust whistle-blowing policies in place to ensure carers can report any concerns about pay to us, we will be following this up with an audit of all care providers in Haringey to ensure that carers are being paid to the levels that our contract payments allow.”
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Permalink Reply by Chris Setz on
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So, that's all right then, a contractor did bad stuff and the Council eventually excommunicated them - all's right with the world. The truth is that if Councillors want to crow about success, they must also accept responsibility for failure. Will any Councillors resign over their admitted failure in this matter?
How many other private sector council contractors are doing badly enough to have their contracts terminated? How much compensation for years of malpractice will be paid? What performance penalties have been imposed? Will the carers get any compensation for being exploited? Is there anything that a contactor can do that a Councillor will accept direct responsibility for? Or is the truth that they don't know what is going on at all until they're told.
It's Council Officers who do the hiring and firing and feed Councillors with enough guff to keep them quiet, to let the civil servants get on with it. After all, Councillors come and go and many Council contracts pre- and post-date them. How can Councilors show that they do, in fact, run the Council?
Should activities 'core' to the Council's mission be carried out by council employees or, like in some other countries, should *most* of the Council's activities be carried out by a direct labour force of local council officers?
Private providers are often billion-dollar orgs, like the Council's refuse-collecting Veolia (a non-UK company, £30bn turnover in 2012, over 300,000 employees in 48 countries). Like all the others, Veolia operate a business model that forcibly prevents Councils from competing, simply by economy of scale.
The private sector pursues an ethic of 'lock-in' which sees Councils paying through the nose. Councils say they can't get the service from anyone else (the 'TINA' argument). Companies like Veolia running everyone else out of town so they can set their charges high is not OK. The idea of the public sector customer as victim, as a cash cow, is not OK. The whole basis for a trade in which they actively try to enslave the client, forcing them to feed the profit need - that's not OK either. Greed is not good. The best private orgs are stakeholders in society, not vampires.
Our council can operate a partnership with us to get stuff done locally and 'small scale', but they are staffed by underpaid people with orders that can't compete with the scale of large private providers.
Companies like Veolia pay highly for schemes that force customers down proprietary paths (and to those charming 'A' teams who can sell them to underpaid Council officers\Govt and then send in the 'B' teams to do the actual work). If you were Head of Procurement in the Council, could you resist dealing with the multi-billion dollar service companies clamouring for your business? No, you couldn't - you need them on your CV. Who else can afford a refuse-collection fleet? Not the Council, so we'll never escape clutches. Who else can build houses? Who else can recruit an army of the low-paid on zero hours to work their guts out and never see any of the resultant profit? The market will sort it all out, nicely extracting the profits to tax havens.
The governing political consensus (right wing) is happy to privatise profit and nationalise loss - that's not only your fault if you voted them in, but because you accept, by living here, that way of doing things (like Brexit) it's your fault if you didn't and you need to accept it - collective responsibility.
Why not give a private sector firm (Conexant, one of the world's largest US companies in its field) the power to bring down a 'reign of terror' on benefit claimants? It's so remote it won't be in-your-face and after all, benefit claimant fraud deserves much more attention than the vastly higher tax benefit fraud apparently pursued by every large corporation.
Small really is and always has been, beautiful.
Low pay grades inside the Council prevent them coming up with a 'big idea' to get out of the lions den but it is possible - you can help. After all, you didn't intend this when you voted Tory/Lib Dem etc did you?
Corporates can be made to pay a realistic price for being allowed to do public sector work - to pay, for instance, into an scheme to compensate workers (and the Council) in the event of malpractice by any public service contractor. Want that?
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The issue is complex. Yes, the councils do pay care providers adequate hourly rates (usually around £15 in inner London). However a lot of it goes unfortunately to shareholders and the (often badly run) organisations and little to the carers themselves. Councils can set the requirement for their contractors to pay minimum wage (like the one I work for does). Plus under the Care Act 2014 councils have the obligation to ensure that service delivery is adequate and step in when they believe any of their local providers are failing.
However also most councils cut back inhouse services more and more if they even have any left. These usually cater for very complex service users who struggle with the constant change of often very little trained carers most block contractors provide.The councils struggle with the cuts (which are really a wider problem and a lack of political will to support anyone underpriveleged in this country) and inhouse services are expensive, so the days of the home help are over and vulnerable service users who often have no other regular contacts than with the carers are completely dependent on an often inadequate service delivery. If failures come up, it's difficult to do anything because the councils often only have about 3 block contractors. As you can imagine, if an embargo is placed or if all these service users need to be shifted to another provider (if anyone can be found to do the job) this is a huge piece of work.
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