With the Employment Rights Bill having received Royal Assent, meaningful improvement to the situation of paid adult social care (ASC) workers in England is close. Questions remain over implementation, funding and overall impact, but the bill undoubtedly heralds change across several areas, including pay and conditions.
While these overdue developments are welcome, they are unlikely to go far enough. One way in which change could go further is through attention to pension policy and provision for ASC workers.
The need to address pensions
A burgeoning literature already explores pension and retirement decision making, including inequalities in opportunities to save and their implications for pension outcomes. However, little is known specifically about the pension situation of ASC workers in England.
The limited existing evidence identifies disparities in levels of pension contributions between ASC workers and those in other sectors, highlighting ‘the urgent need for systemic change’. There is also a higher-than-average rate of pension opt-outs from (auto-enrolled) private pensions in ASC.
In 2023, Skills for Care, in its annual ASC workforce intelligence report, included data on pensions for the first time. It reported that only 43 per cent of 6,800 responding employers contribute more than the minimum 3 per cent to the workplace pensions of care workers they employ, indicating some workers are missing out on these above minimum levels of pension contributions.
A key detail is the evidence that local authority-employed ASC workers, who account for less than 10 per cent overall, consistently receive more generous employer pension contributions.
Why pension policy and provision matter in the ASC context
Pension policy and provision is an important dimension of job quality, which has declined in ASC over recent decades. However, movement to enhance pensions would combine well with the other positive changes in the offing.
Improving pensions would require investment, and this is what ASC workers need following years of underinvestment and marginalisation. Improving the quality of work in this way would crucially lead to better quality of care, with the connections between the two well established in existing research.
Workforce sustainability, recruitment and retention
One of the myriad problems facing ASC is its ongoing workforce sustainability struggle, with recruitment and retention identified as key components of the 10 Year Health Plan for England.
There are currently 111,000 ASC vacancies, a figure that has remained stubbornly high in recent years. Turnover is high relative to other sectors, and this generates flux and hinders stability and continuity. Considerable numbers of ASC workers leave their jobs soon after starting.
Pensions can have a positive effect on recruitment and retention, especially as workers age. Workforce sustainability is further threatened by demographic characteristics, with concern about the number of ASC workers nearing retirement age. 29 per cent of ASC workers are aged 55 and over, compared to 21 per cent of economically active workers.
Migration, insecurity and pensions
In recent years, international recruitment has been a key source of new ASC workers. However, the UK government is planning to halt this by discontinuing ASC workers’ access to the Health and Social Care Visa.
In this context of uncertainty and insecurity, measures to make ASC employment more attractive and stable, like enhanced pension provision, would offer the prospect of enhancing job quality. The migrant care workforce encounters specific challenges related to pension transfers between countries and more limited knowledge of, and access to, UK systems. This can present a real challenge for opportunities and expectations regarding pension saving.
Pensions, inequality and care work
Pensions are a crucial dimension of the quality of ASC employment. ASC workers tend to be on low-paid, part-time and often insecure contracts, which constrain capacity to undertake pension saving.
Furthermore, paid care work is embedded within wider inequalities, particularly relating to class, gender, race and ethnicity. Women’s occupational segregation in low-paid employment, such as in ASC, contributes to the gender wealth gap.
This has several dimensions, including the pay gap, but a clear gender pensions gap exists too. This results in part from low pay (as in ASC employment) across the life course and persistent material disadvantage. Evidence also suggests that women have less confidence and knowledge than men in relation to pensions.
There is also an ethnicity pensions gap, which recent research shows to interact with gender, compounding disadvantages experienced by minority ethnic women in this domain.
Plans to address limited research knowledge of ASC worker pensions
The lack of attention given to ASC workers’ pensions is surprising given the factors serving to undermine these workers’ pension accumulation prospects. This lends urgency to further exploration of ASC workers’ pension circumstances. While this should include structural and economic factors, we also need to explore the attitudes and behaviour of ASC workers. This could help to identify mechanisms and develop resources for sharing information on pensions that specifically target the ASC workforce. To this end, we are commencing some exploratory research in this area, with ASC workers, organisations representing their interests and pensions experts. Our aim is to begin to build a foundational knowledge of views and experiences. This will help us to better understand ASC workers’ circumstances in relation to pensions and what changes would be most effective.
Duncan U Fisher is a Research Associate based at the ESRC Centre for Care, University of Sheffield.
Liam Foster is a Professor of Social Policy in the School of Sociological Studies, Politics and International Relations at The University of Sheffield.
Who still cares? Gendered and classed ‘care trajectories’ into paid adult social care and childcare work by Duncan Uist Fisher and Donald Simpson. Published in the International Journal of Care and Caring and is available to read open access on Bristol University Press Digital here.
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