Recruitment and Retention of Staff in the Social Care sector

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:16 pm on 28 November 2017.

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Photo of Carwyn Jones Carwyn Jones Labour 2:16, 28 November 2017

Yes. First of all, we provided £19 million of recurrent funding for local authorities to work with their service providers to help manage the impact of implementing the national living wage, which we wanted to see. What have we done? Well, we’ve brought forward regulations to improve the terms and conditions of the workforce, requiring providers to provide more transparency in their use of zero-hours contracts, to offer workers a choice of fixed-hours contracts after a three-month period of employment, and to clearly delineate between travel and care time. We’ve extended the register to domiciliary care workers on a voluntary basis from 2018, ahead of the mandatory registration from 2020, and that’s an essential aspect of ensuring the professionalisation of the workforce so we can have social care workers who are appropriately qualified to deliver quality care to the vulnerable in our society.