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SCOTLAND'S SOCIAL CARE LABOUR MARKET
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
1. Policy attention has been brought to labour market pressures within social care. This report brings together currently available data in order to build a picture of trends in the labour market and to help improve knowledge and understanding of the sector in Scotland. A summary document based on this longer report is also available on the Scottish Executive website at www.scotland.gov.uk/publications
2. Over the last decade the social care sector has been growing, and this trend may continue as the composition of employment in Scotland continues to change. 1 As social care covers a broad workforce and the structure of the sector varies regionally 2, boundaries of the sector are difficult to define and separate. The main strands of activity however undertaken within social care are children's services, work with offenders, community care, including older people, people with physical disabilities, mental health problems and learning difficulties. Early education and childcare is also included under the broad banner of social care. The skills involved in posts in the sector vary and include demand for specialist qualified staff such as social workers, fieldwork staff, occupational therapists, and managers along with a variety of posts in childminding, domiciliary care, support services and administrative staff.
3. Section 1 of this report looks at estimates of overall employment in the sector, comparing this to other UK countries and also decomposing the size of the public, private and voluntary sector in Scotland. Time trends indicate that there has been an expansion in employment in the sector which has been particularly stark in the independent sector over a nine year period. Local authority finance trends would indicate that some of this may be linked to increases in public finance.
4. The next two sections give a summary of data available on the current workforce. Section 2 discusses the age profile of the social care workforce in comparison with other sectors. Section 3 provides information on the gender, qualifications and job characteristics of the workforce including trends in part time and full time employment, types of contract, and job tenure.
5. Section 4 gives an analysis of information available on the private and voluntary sectors using anonymised Care Commission pre-inspection return data. For most data fields there does not seem to be much divergence between characteristics of the independent sector compared to the overall sector except for average size of organisation unit inspected and patterns in age composition of the workforce.
6. Local authority data is examined in Section 5 to help explain the currently highly publicised vacancy figures. The evidence suggests that there has been a large expansion in the sector since the birth of the Scottish Parliament in 1999 and that labour demand has therefore been outstripping labour supply. This section also examines the same trends specifically in relation to social worker employment and vacancies. A discussion on available data on staff turnover, recruitment and retention across all sectors is also included. It is highlighted however that it is not currently possible, using existing data, to separate the degree of movement within the sector (churn) as opposed to complete exit from the sector.
7. Section 6 highlights projected long-term demographic trends within Scotland and considers how this may potentially feed through to labour supply and to labour demand through changes in numbers of service users in particular age groups. Demographic change will have a gradual impact on the labour market and in the long term pressure may therefore shift to different service areas, e.g., from children's services to services for older people.
8. Conclusions are brought together in Section 7. This includes a speculative discussion of future policy "development impacts" on the labour market. 3 Policy or legislative change is likely to have a starker impact on the market than demographic change. Expansion in the sector, if abrupt, will result in a period of adjustment as labour supply catches up with labour demand; this is likely to be particularly noticeable in staff groups where requirements for the achievement of qualifications impose a time delay between the market signalling (through increased vacancy rates and wage settlements) that more labour is required and qualified labour becoming available.
9. A series of policy "development impacts" may not be individually distinguishable in employment data but if more change is anticipated then further labour market adjustment can be expected and current vacancy rates may not ease until this settles. The extent to which proactive, as opposed to reactive intervention in the labour market can take place however depends on the quality of data that is available and the analysis that can therefore be carried out.
10. A key issue for public sector planning is that of imperfect or incomplete information. Attempting to provide and/or finance services that in a purely free market may not exist, exist in a less than socially optimal quantity or be subject to inequality of access, carries a need for the ability to plan effectively. The social care market in Scotland is primarily a planned sector within the economy; even though provision of services and employment is divided between the private, public and voluntary sectors, a significant amount of finance in the sector stems from the public sector.
11. A strong grasp of the aggregate sector is therefore needed for planning purposes at a national/regional level, in addition to workforce planning at the organisational level. This reports brings together data on the social care labour market and also sets it into context with other inter-related components such as finance, service users, wider demographic trends and policy expansion effects. It is the uncertainty over how these components interact that make labour force planning difficult along with predicting the impact of policy changes.
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