Contact your MP

One crucial thing you can do to help push for better social care worker pay is to talk to your MP. You can write to them, book into one of their surgeries or see if the people you support would like to invite them to visit and see support work happening in person.

First: Find your MP

Finding your MP is easier than you may think. Simply visit writetothem.com and use your postcode to look them up. On their information page they will have their contact details listed; you can email them, post a letter to them or both!

Visit writetothem.com

Next: Contact them

You can book into one of their surgeries (public sessions where they talk to their constituents) or write to them by email/post. We’ve provided some suggested text and resources to help you do this.

Write to them about Pay Fair For Social Care

Writing to them is a quick and easy way to share what’s important to you. We’ve provided some information about why we’re running the campaign and we recommend you personalise this and include that you are one of their constituents.

Book into one of their surgeries

Most MPs hold surgeries in their constituency to give people an opportunity to meet them and discuss matters of concern. MPs usually hold surgeries once a week and advertise them locally or online. A MP may take up an issue on a constituent’s behalf (ParliamentUK).

Contact your MP to find out more.

Ask if the people you support would like them to visit their home

If you support someone, they might agree that this is an important issue and want to help. Use our easy read guide to see if they would like to invite their MP to visit their home and talk about what support work is really like and why it is so important. They can also talk about other issues that are important to them.

We’ve created a guide you can use with them to explain what this is for and what to expect on the day of the visit.

We’ve also created a letter to your MP inviting them to visit. This is in easy read and includes areas for you to include your organisation logo and those you support to sign it.

Information to help you lobby your MP

• Everyday thousands of care and support workers undertake complex delegated nursing tasks. They work to understand and tackle the causes of distressed behaviour. They support people to make choices and gain control over their life. They maintain family relationships, help with friendships, support with employment and personal care. They are skilled, professional workers.
• Continuity of support is vital, and this is affected by low pay leading to a high turnover of staff. It’s disruptive for an individual with complex needs to be supported by someone they don’t know from an agency.
• If they don’t know the person coming into their home to support them this can make them worry.
• A support worker understands how they communicate, and this takes time for an agency worker to learn, affecting the quality of support.
• Support workers know what the individual(s) they support likes to do and has been matched with them to ensure they have common interests and hobbies.
• We need the government to benchmark and fund minimum care worker pay at NHS Band 3, currently £11.67 per hour. This would set care and support workers alongside NHS therapy assistants, pharmacy assistants, and clerical staff. It would allow care and support workers to earn a wage aligned with their skills and responsibilities.
• In the past three years a typical sales assistant has gone from earning 13 pence per hour less than a care and support worker to 21p more. This shift is having a huge impact on people’s career choices.
• Amidst the ongoing cost-of-living crisis, many skilled care and support workers are moving to better paid roles elsewhere. This has resulted in 152,000 job vacancies across social care, and hundreds of thousands of people needing care but not receiving it.
• Overstretched local authorities are struggling to meet the real cost of care and this leads to Providers like Dimensions having to subsidise care and support which is unsustainable.