Bolton Council to spend extra £10m on private care providers

This comes amid a drive to encourage more private providers to pay the real living wage as well as cost and inflationary pressures.

A meeting earlier this week approved plans to spend a total of £10.69m in fee uplifts to be paid over 2024-25.

Council leader Cllr Nick Peel said: “Obviously there is inflationary pressure, there is always pressure for fees to be higher.”

He added: “But our ambition for all of the independent care workers is for them all to be on the real living wage.

Bolton Council took the decision to pay the extra costs (Image: Newsquest)

“That’s the stated ambition, we don’t currently have the funding to do that but we encourage all of our providers to pay the real living wage.

“They are quite dependent on fees they get from the council but they do have other sources of income as well.”

A council report said that increases in both the national living wage and the real living wage announced in the autumn of 2023 had created “significant pressures” for providers.

This came alongside mounting cost-of-living pressures more generally.

The report said: “Providers of adult social care services continue to face challenges to maintain the provision of service and are reporting difficulties in recruiting and retaining experienced managers and nursing staff.

“Providers report often having to pay considerable agency fees to cover necessary vacancies. Coupled with the cost of living rises, this is a significant additional financial burden for providers.

“When setting a fee rate for care, the largest component of the rate is the direct and associated employee costs of providing that service, but this varies across the types of care.”

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The report said that Bolton’s adult social care rates were set at a level to let providers pay the real living wage.

But it said that “due to other market pressures this will not be contractually enforced to meet this obligation but will be kept under review in 2024/5 with a view to do so in the future".

It also said that the council expect free supplies of personal protection equipment, that had been provided by the Department for Health and Social Care during the pandemic, to stop.

The new fees rate will be paid either from April 1 or April 8 this year.