Purpose

To agree the annual inflationary
uplift

Content

RESOLVED
 
KEY
DECISION
 
That
the Executive approved an uplift in fees paid to adult social care
providers to support providers in meeting the additional financial
pressures including National Living Wage for frontline carers
inflationary pressures from 1st April 2025.

 

Provision
Type

Recommendation

Net
increase in cost £’s

Home
Care framework

Uplift: the Urban Hourly rate by 3.85% to £23.34; the
suburban hourly rate by 3.7% to £24.38; the Rural Hourly rate
by 3.4% to £26.47; and the Extra Rural Hourly rate by 3% to
£29.72; resulting in an average uplift percentage of
3.49%.
 
Uplift the support at home standard and enhanced hourly rate by
6.25% to £21.00 and £23.04; and the overnight sleeping
and waking rate by 4.71% to £105.46 and
£162.89.
 
Total

£819,668
 
 
 
 
 
£99,814
 
 
 
 
 
 
£919,482
 

Older Persons Residential Care and Older persons Dementia
Residential Care

Increase the expected to pay rates by 5% to £747.60 per
week and £846.73 per week.

£693,506

Older Persons Nursing Care

Increase the expected to pay rate by 17% to £918.49 per
week (excluding funded nursing care). NLW only would be 4.96%
(applying the 6.73% NLW uplift to the staffing elements) and this
represents an additional investment of 12.04% to incentivise
providers to join the Council’s Frameworks.

£196,198

Older Persons Dementia Nursing Care

Increase expected to pay rate up to 17% to £995.03 per
week (excluding funded nursing care). NLW only would be 4.96%
(applying the 6.73% NLW uplift to the staffing elements) and this
represents additional investment of 12.04% to incentivise providers
to join the Council’s Frameworks.

£413,706

Working Age Adults Residential Care

Increase Tiered Payments by 5%

£448,414

Supported Living Providers

Increase tiered payment rates by 3.5%

£911,724

Day
Opportunities

Increase session rates by 3.5%

£101,068

Independent Living Framework (Extracare)

Increase care and support tiered payments by 3.85%

£14,890

Direct Payment increase where personal assistants are
employed

Increase hourly rate by 6.73% to meet National Living
Wage

£396,766

Total

 

£4,095,754

 
 
Reasons for Recommendations:
 
The
National Living Wage (NLW) increase for 2025/26 is 6.73%. This
compares to 9.8% in 2024/25 and 9.7% in 2023/24. In addition to
this we know that providers continue to face broader inflationary
pressures, in particular the impact of the changes to National
Insurance in the 2024 Autumn budget that will impact in
2025/26.
 
The
care and support market in North Northamptonshire continues to
experience difficulties with the recruitment and retention of care
staff with a vacancy rate of 6.8% (3% lower than in 2022/23) and
turnover rate of 23.4% for care providers (0.6% lower than in
2022/23).
 
Whilst this is an improving trend the data continues to
demonstrate that providers still face challenges in recruiting and
retaining staff locally, this is evidenced by high numbers of staff
working with certificates of sponsorship across all Adult Social
care markets.
 
The
ability of providers to recruit and retain a sufficient workforce
has been one of the key challenges and risks for the sector for
some time. By effectively targeting our annual uplifts we support
our contracted care providers’ ability to develop strategic
responses to workforce challenges, including offering rates of pay
that are competitive with other local sectors.
 
The
position in North Northamptonshire is in keeping with the national
picture. Alongside targeting our inflationary uplifts, we continue
to work in partnership with our contracted providers to make social
care an attractive career proposition within North
Northamptonshire.
 
We
continue to work with providers to offer and signpost to training
and development opportunities. However, fee uplifts remain a
crucial lever in ensuring providers can support social care as
being an attractive career option for people in North
Northamptonshire.
 
There continues to be a need to utilise non-framework providers
for many of the types of provision and to commission individual
packages of care with these non-framework providers. Whilst there
has been a significant decrease in the number of non-framework
providers commissioned (with none required for homecare), many of
these providers continue to be comparatively more expensive on a
unit (hour or week) basis.
 
Non-framework provision can be costly to the Council and the
proposed uplift seeks to positively influence existing contract
framework supply through retention and sustainability whilst also
incentivising an increase in supply through levering better rates
of pay and reward for our framework providers. Work continues to
minimise our utilisation of non-framework providers and to focus
our commissioning activity solely with our framework
providers.
 
Our
strategy is to focus our development and commissioning activity
specifically with our framework providers. Alongside this fee
uplift we are focused on utilising our enhanced provider offer for
framework providers that includes training opportunities, an
enhanced quality monitoring and support function and access to
other resources (such as a provider portal currently under
development). This enables the Council to support improvement in
the quality of its framework-contracted care providers, secure a
sustainable market of high-quality providers and secure value for
money in our independent care spend.
 
A
benchmarking exercise of nursing fees has demonstrated that
additional investment is required into this segment of the local
social care market. Only 35% of placements for nursing care are
with a contracted provider; feedback from providers is that this is
because of contracted fees are not attractive and our benchmarking
output has demonstrated that our contracted fees do not compare
favourably with comparable authorities. This is driving an increase
in off framework placements and higher average weekly fees
(£1038) for new nursing care placements. The proposed fee
uplift will incentivise providers to join our framework, increase
the number of placements with contracted providers and result in a
net decrease in the cost of new nursing care placements with the
Expected to Pay Rate set at £918.49 for nursing care and
£995.03 for Dementia Nursing Care. This reduction is built
into the MTFP.
 
Alternative Options Considered: The alternative options, in
summary, considered included:
 
Option 1: Do nothing and apply no
uplifts (not recommended)
 
Option 2: Targeting uplifts at
particular service types (not recommended)
 
Option 3: Uplift in fees paid to adult
social care providers to support providers in meeting the
additional financial pressures including National Living Wage for
frontline carers  recognising
inflationary pressures (Recommended Option)
 
Option 4: Lower uplift to the whole
market including non-framework and framework providers (Not
recommended)
 
The
options are presented in more detail in section 6 of this
report.