Home care and travel time pay – What is the situation?
There has been confusion in the past on travel time pay across Domiciliary care, and pressure is mounting on the home care sector to make sure providers are getting it right. Back in January 2019 an article by localgov.com looked at research completed by UNISON which found that 54% of councils in England and 60% in Wales failed to stipulate on care workers contracts that employees should be paid for time spent travelling between visits.
This news meant that potentially thousands of carers could have been out of pocket and therefore being paid less than the national minimum wage.
UNISON guidance explains that all care workers are entitled to be paid at least the national minimum wage or living wage for the work that they do, this includes carers on zero-hour contracts. This means that time spent caring for clients, travelling to appointments, and waiting to start the appointment should be included in the pay calculation. At the very least the work done must average out as at least the national minimum wage or national living wage.
How can you ensure your carers are paid correctly?
Travel distance, travel time and wait time all need to be considered, to ensure carers are being paid either the national minimum wage or national living wage depending on age. It’s important to make this visible to them, to avoid short comings and potential legal issues if something is amiss.
Access People Planner for community care includes modules designed to support your payroll processes and can automatically calculate your carers pay to ensure they’re paid at least the national minimum or living wage taking into account their travel and distance. If you’re already a user of Access People Planner you may already utilise this feature to great effect, however if you don’t use it it’s something that is key in making sure you’re carers are paid correctly and more importantly to the legal amount.
But it doesn’t stop there! As part of the solutions national minimum wage calculator it takes into account travel and wait time as part of the travel timesheets, which again feeds into the calculator and makes sure your payroll team process the correct pay.
Its integration with Google Maps also allows you to assign the right client to the right member of staff, and monitors distance and routes taken. Efficiently plan routes for your mobile care workers and ensure accurate travel time calculations. The actual mileage for an employee can be calculated when reconciling visits ensuring you pay your staff accurately following NLW, NMW and travel time regulations.
It’s easy to monitor too, utilising Access Workspace for Care and it’s powerful insights, you can build a picture on your desktop based on what you want to see. It allows you to be proactive and less reactive as you can see pay related incidents before they happen and effectively prevent incidents happening in the future which in the long term, avoids potential legal complications for your organisation.
To find out more about Access People Planner for community care and its payroll features contact your Access Group account manager or fill in this form and a member of the team will be in touch.
Want to see how this functionality is set up?
If you’re a customer using Access People Planner we’ll be hosting a webinar on Wednesday 23rd December at 1pm looking at the functionality of Google Maps which in turn can provide NMW top-ups if required. The webinar will show you how to set this up in your system, but also refer to the knowledge based articles on the Access Group Support Portal on how the calculations are made by the system.
If you’re interested in attending the webinar click here to register.
