The All Party Parliamentary Group on Social Care has acknowledged “a great debt of gratitude” to a team led by Kent Law School Professor Lydia Hayes for providing “expansive, thorough and vigorous” research in support of their All-Party Inquiry into the care sector workforce.
Professor Hayes explained: ‘We investigated how care workers could be better supported to develop as career professionals and why this was necessary. We analysed care standards regulation in each of the UK’s four nations and identified the complex skills that care workers need. It is clear that training requirements and the regulation of workforce standards is much weaker in England than elsewhere. We urgently need to improve the availability and quality of social care and this cannot be achieved unless care workers are genuinely respected for their professionalism. This means better pay, income security and high quality training are essential if social care work is to have a professional footing.’
With financial support from the GMB Union, Professor Hayes collaborated with Dr Eleanor Johnson and Alison Tarrant to produce the report ‘Professionalisation At Work in Adult Social Care’. It provides a picture of professionalisation in adult social care across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and is cited frequently in the APPG Inquiry Report entitled ‘Elevation, Registration & Standardisation: The Professionalisation of Social Care Workers’. To support the Inquiry, the research team considered policy initiatives, current skill and knowledge requirements, workforce registration, induction, training and the legal regulation of workforce standards.
In an introduction to the Inquiry Report, Louise Haigh MP and Gillian Keegan MP said: ‘We owe a great debt of gratitude to Dr Hayes, Dr Johnson and Alison Tarrant for their expansive, thorough and vigorous report to us, which has proved to be a great help in increasing our understanding of how this sector presently functions, and the challenges that it faces.’
As a result of their research, Professor Hayes’s team found that training issues, workers’ occupational registration, regulatory concern for service-user safety, terms and conditions of work, and sector funding are intricately connected. Their paper states: ‘Regard for professionalization must therefore advance on all fronts to reflect the social importance of the workforce and to remedy severe problems that have been left to drift for far too long.’
Professor Hayes is Principal Investigator for a Wellcome Trust project on The Legal and Social Life of Care Standards Regulation in England, Scotland and Wales. Her current research includes ongoing work to trace the employment rights and labour standards impacts of devolution, particularly in Wales and Scotland. She is also developing empirical research projects about the workplace impacts of minimum wage and equal pay claims-making by women in low waged work.
Her new monograph One Hundred Years of Equal Pay Law will be published by Hart in 2020. Her previous monograph, Stories of Care: A Labour of Law (2017) is the first to have been awarded prizes for excellence from both the Socio-Legal Studies Association and Society of Legal Scholars.
