Frontline staff at one of the UK’s biggest care charities are to receive a second pay increase in six months.
Community Integrated Care announced that salaries for its support workers would next month rise to £10 an hour in England and £11 an hour in Scotland.
The rise is expected to affect about 5,000 members of staff and represents a pay increase of approximately 3 per cent. It will cost CIC £3m a year.
CIC also raised salaries for staff in October, amid an ongoing recruitment crisis in the care sector.
It warned at the time that with 112,000 vacancies across the sector, charities and other providers faced recruitment challenges on an “unprecedented scale”.
The charity says the proportion of unfilled roles in the care sector has since gone up further.
CIC is one of the biggest charities in the country, with an annual income of £131m.
CIC said that, under the latest pay rises, a support worker in England would receive £20,857 for working 40 hours a week, worth an extra £625 per year. Other frontline staff will receive “equivalent uplifts” in pay, the charity said.
Mark Adams, chief executive of CIC, said he was “proud” that the charity was in a position to offer extra pay, but acknowledged that other providers were “tightly bound by the government’s funding constraints and a recruitment crisis that is buckling our sector”.
He said that care sector vacancies had risen from 9.4 per cent to 9.5 per between December and January, showing that “this crisis is neither slowing, or going”.
Scotland’s biggest social care charity, Enable Scotland, also announced a payrise for frontline staff last year.