A MAJOR campaign has been launched by a North Wales social care leader to ensure qualified staff who work in care homes and domiciliary care in are paid a minimum of £20,000 a year.

Mario Kreft MBE, the chairman of Care Forum Wales, said they had been condemned to low pay for many years because of the “morally bankrupt” formulas used by local authorities and health boards to calculate the fees for social care.

According to Mr Kreft, the heroic response of care workers in saving lives during the coronavirus pandemic had highlighted their true value and it was high time it was recognised by the authorities who commissioned publicly funded social care.

It was, he said, a national disgrace the 2020 Fair Pay campaign was necessary.

He hoped it would shame the councils and the health boards into taking action to finally ensure qualified care workers could be paid properly, after a quarter of a century of a mismanaged market which has seen social care being treated as a Cinderella service.

The Welsh Government had shown the way earlier this year when it announced a one off £500 bonus payment for social care staff.

Mr Kreft said: “It was very welcome recognition and now local authorities and health boards should follow suit by updating their funding formulas so qualified care workers received at least £20,000 a year as a bare minimum.

All those who worked in social care deserved at least the Real Living Wage.”

One of Mr Kreft’s fears was the NHS will effectively poach social care staff to cope with the extra demands caused by the second surge of the virus. Pay rates in the NHS were historically higher than those available in care homes and domiciliary care because their funding in relative terms was a lot more generous.

He added: “Social care staff have risen magnificently to the immense challenges posed by the Covid 19 pandemic and the public understand better than ever that these people do have important skills and are vital to their communities across Wales.

“They are an army of heroes and should be viewed as a value rather than a cost to society.

“It is high time that when local authorities and health board commission publicly funded social care services the formulas they use finally recognise their true value and enable providers to pay frontline staff a minimum of £20,000 a year from April 1 next year.

“Existing formulas that use the basic living wage as their benchmark are unacceptable, particularly given what the sector has achieved this year and the support the sector has from the public.

“We know from the first wave of the pandemic that the NHS does not have enough staff to run the rainbow hospitals in Wales, so the only place that they can go and get people with those sorts of skills is the care sector and the care sector is critically endangered.

“Currently, many of the formulas used to commission publicly funded social care services are predicated on paying at or just above the legal minimum wage to a significant number of people which flies in the face of the traditional Welsh qualities of fairness and equality.

“As a result, we have a system that is self perpetuating that has created a morally bankrupt vicious circle.