A Public Accounts Committee report this week revealed how care workers are leaving the profession due to crippling low pay - and the Government has done nothing.

This week’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC) report is just the latest in a long line of indictments of the crisis in adult social care.

With the government’s much-delayed green paper now imminent, this dire situation cannot go on any longer– the sector needs real change now.

The PAC report paints a picture that is all too familiar to those working in care.

Years of chronic underfunding have produced a system where the needs of many of society’s most vulnerable people are not being met, and where care workers are too often left exposed to exploitation.

Dysfunctional commissioning practices have become depressingly standard across the sector. Price is by far the most dominant factor in decisions around care, with most councils failing to pay the minimum amount considered necessary to provide safe levels of support.

The fundamentally flawed models used by the majority of local authorities mean that providers are given no certainty over how many hours they will be asked to deliver by the council. This insecurity is then passed on to the workforce.

Based on ONS figures, Unison estimates that there are more than 300,000 social care workers employed on zero hours contracts across the UK.

There continues to be an alarming number of care workers failing to receive even the National Minimum Wage, let alone the government’s version of the living wage. It has been estimated that between 160,000 and 220,000 care workers are illegally paid below minimum wage.

The main reason is care workers not being paid for their travel time between visits. Yet there has been a failure to expose and punish organisations not paying staff the legal rate for the job. Government action to name and shame non-compliant employers has so far been restricted to small local companies where often only one worker has been identified as having been illegally paid.

In addition, Unison has campaigned for many years to have sleep-in shifts classed as working time for the purposes of calculating compliance with the minimum wage.

At the heart of this issue are thousands of workers paid less than the legal minimum for work done.

Sleep-in shifts involve significant caring responsibilities, often for people with acute needs and care staff would be disciplined if they left their work premises.

Unison wants all workers owed back pay for sleep-in shifts to be remunerated without delay. Employers have to take responsibility for underpayment, but the government must also provide the funding that social care so desperately needs.

Illegally low pay rates fuel staff turnover and send out a message that care workers do not deserve to be respected for their work – crucial points, recognised by the PAC.

Social care has amongst the highest rates of staff turnover in the economy. For example, Skills for Care’s National Minimum Dataset shows that there is a turnover rate of around 32% for the role of care worker in adult residential care in England, but this rises to a shocking 44% for care workers in adult domiciliary care.

Too few care staff are able to access the levels of training and development that they want and need, further undermining the esteem of the workforce and the overall status of the sector.

Many areas are struggling with large and growing staffing vacancies as a result of the issues outlined in this article and, as the PAC point out, the impending exit from the EU will only make this worse.

There are also fears that a minority government bitterly divided by Brexit will lack the necessary strength to drive through the ambitious change the sector badly needs. Further delays and another commission seeking to push the issue further into the long grass will not wash.

The sector desperately needs extra funding, but other actions can be taken now.

Unison’s Ethical Care and Residential Care Charters are well-established industry standards helping councils ensure they only contract with care providers that treat staff and service users fairly.

With Allied Healthcare the latest care provider in financial trouble, councils should also now be obliged to investigate the sustainability of providers’ financial models before contracts are awarded.

This should be accompanied by bigger picture legislative change to give the Care Quality Commission greater powers to regulate local authority commissioning practices, as proposed in the original version of the Care Bill, and endorsed by the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee last year.

Christina McAnea is Unison’s assistant general secretary. She tweets here. 

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