Care England responds to government’s Fair Pay Agreement announcement

The Department of Health and Social Care has today published its response to the Fair Pay Agreement consultation, confirming the design of the new Adult Social Care Negotiating Body and the process for reaching the first Fair Pay Agreement for the care workforce.

The Negotiating Body will operate at arm’s length from ministers, with equal representation from workers and employers. Worker representation will be coordinated by the Trades Union Congress, while employer representation will be coordinated by the Care Provider Alliance, of which Care England is a member. Negotiations are expected to begin in 2027, with the first Fair Pay Agreement coming into effect in April 2028.

Professor Martin Green OBE, Chief Executive of Care England, said:

“I have spent years listening to care workers tell me the same thing, that they love the job and they cannot afford to keep doing it. Today’s announcement is the clearest sign yet that government has heard that too, and Care England warmly welcomes it.

 

We are pleased that the CPA has been confirmed to coordinate employer representation on the Negotiating Body. It is essential that providers of every type, size and specialism have a genuine voice in shaping an agreement that will affect them directly, and we will work as part of the CPA to ensure that voice is heard.”

Today’s announcement lands on a sector already showing the strain from three different directions. Skills for Care’s latest figures show the vacancy rate has fallen to 6.2%, its lowest level in a decade, but that improvement has been built on international recruitment rather than a resurgent domestic workforce. The number of posts filled by British nationals has fallen by 130,000 since 2020/21, and the Health and Care Worker visa route has now closed to new overseas applicants, removing the very lever that made recent progress possible. Skills for Care projects the sector will need 410,000 additional posts by 2040 just to keep pace with an ageing population, a demand curve that cannot be met by recruitment routes that are narrowing rather than widening.

At the same time, CQC’s assessments of local authorities have found that most councils are rated only just “good” or worse, with commissioning quality tied directly to local leadership rather than resource, and ADASS’s own survey shows councils overspent adult social care budgets by £715 million in 2025/26, with only 15% of Directors confident they can sustain the local care market. A Fair Pay Agreement negotiated into a workforce pipeline that is narrowing and a commissioning system that is already overstretched will only succeed if government treats these pressures as one connected problem, not three separate ones.

“Welcome as this is, it is a framework and not yet a guarantee. We have seen good intentions in social care fall short before when they were not matched by delivery, and Care England will not be shy about saying so if that happens again here.

 

Providers want this to succeed as much as anyone. A workforce that is paid and valued properly is a workforce that stays, and that means better, more consistent care for the people who rely on it. Care England will bring everything we know about the realities of delivering care into this process, and we will keep pressing government to give the Negotiating Body what it needs to make good on the promise being made today.”