What Are your obligations as an Employer employing Domiciliary Care Workers & paying travel time?
Businesses employing domiciliary care workers can easily fall foul of the requirement to pay the minimum wage if they do not pay travel time to their workers. Research has shown that 75% of care staff who look after people at home are not being paid for the time it takes them to travel between appointments.
Home care workers spend almost a fifth of their working day travelling between people’s homes and most are paid at or just above the minimum wage but this hourly amount is dramatically reduced if youtheir employers don’t pay travel time.
The ideal would be to have travel time payment become a contractual requirement in addition to the contact time payment they have with clients, but we are not quite there yet.
One of the responsibilities of a good employer is to provide payslips that accurately detail the time carers have spent travelling and what if anything, they have been paid for this. This paid travel time should be between clients and not from home to their first appointment and from their last appointment back home.
Let’s look at an example and pick a care worker and call her Susan. Ideally a care work should have a car to make the commute between clients easy and manageable and be able to get to as many clients as possible. The current mileage rate is 45p per mileage and she works a 10.5 hour shift. She starts her day at 7:30am with her first visit between 8am and 10am. Her travel from home to this first client is not paid. So, she starts at 8am finishes with that client at 10am. Then she drives to the next client starting contact time at 10:30am. This is a 20min drive and she gets paid 45p*10miles - £4.50p. She is with this second client from 10:30am – 1pm, a 2.5 hour appointment. Her next appointment is at 2pm. She gets to have a 30min break and another 20min drive to a 3 hour shift between 2pm and 5pm. And then finishes the day with a 4th and final shift from 5.15pm - 8:15pm.
Her contact time from this example is:
8am – 10am : 2hrs
10:30am – 1pm – 2.5hrs
2pm – 5pm – 3hrs
5:15pm – 8:15pm – 3hrs
Total = 10.5hrs @ £12.21 (minimum wage) = £128.21
Travel time = 55mins ( about 25miles ) = 25*45p = £11.25p
Total earnings for the day = £139.46
What are the recommendations from this little example to business owners who employ care workers?
Plan shift patterns to minimise travel time: W hen planning shift patterns for your workers, ensure you plan clients that are geographically close together for each shift. This will ensure your workers travel time is as little as possible saving travel time and travel spend. This will also help to maximise your workers income as they get paid at the highest possible rate for their working hours because most of that time will be contact time with clients.