Scottish Labour pledges living wage for council care workers
All council care workers would be paid at least £7.85 an hour under a Scottish Labour government, the party's deputy leader has pledged.
Labour would compel all local authorities to pay care workers employed directly by the councils and private firms engaged in council contracts the minimum salary mandated by the Living Wage Foundation.
It is designed to address the high turnover in care staff and make caring a long-term career.
Labour deputy leader Alex Rowley said: In hospitals across the country patients have to wait for hours in A&E because the beds they should be in are occupied by elderly patients who are fit to go home but can't because the care package isn't there.
The solution to this problem isn't to send short-term emergency teams to our A&E departments.
We need to ensure that people can be cared for at home or in the community, and key to that is tackling the recruitment and retention problem in the care sector.
That's why Scottish Labour supports a real living wage for care workers, so that we can make caring a career people will chose for the long-term.
This will improve the care elderly people receive and relieve the pressure on our frontline NHS.
Giving care workers a real living wage is the kind of investment our health service needs.
Anyone who has been in receipt of care, or has had a family member receive care, knows that carers are just the salt of the earth. The idea that carers are paid no more than the minimum wage just beggars belief.
We need to invest in the NHS to make it fit for the 2040s, not the 1940s. By investing in our care workers now we can save hundreds of millions of pounds in the costs of delayed discharge.
This money will help us to meet not just the costs of care, but to fund the new cures and treatments the NHS can offer in the years ahead.''
A spokesman for council umbrella body Cosla said: Cosla has already given its collective political support to delivering a living wage for our social care staff.
However, we are realistic about the size of the investment this would require.
The question is not whether it is the right thing to do for our staff and the quality of the services they deliver, but how local government is supported to find the necessary levels of investment to deliver it in the current financial climate.
It is also important to understand that pay rates are not the only important issue in relation to the capacity and effectiveness of social care.
We need to be ambitious in addressing the level of reform required to deliver an effective and sustainable health and social care service which prevents unnecessary hospital admissions and readmissions.''