The hidden cause of our social care crisis — AND those infernal self-service checkouts

Should you happen to ask the elderly to list the most depressing aspects of modern life, I suspect that near the top would be the rapid increase in automated check-outs.

And if you were to ask what actually terrifies them, rather than just irritates, they might talk about their prospects for care when they are truly dependent.

over the weekend, stories emerged which brought both these matters to the fore — and they have one fact in common. That fact is the consequence of the minimum wage; or to be more precise, the way the political parties have been attempting to buy votes by bidding up the minimum wage.

last Saturday, an organisation which knows as much as anyone about the concerns of the elderly spoke of a ‘devastating’ loss of regular human interaction as a result of the move to automated check-outs in shops.

lisa harris, a spokeswoman for Saga, said that ‘for many older people, the removal of a standard check-out is much more than an inconvenience. For some, a visit to their local supermarket may be the only contact they have with a human in a typical week’.

Intimidated

And Amy Perrin, founder of The Marmalade Trust, a charity tackling loneliness among the elderly, told The Times that not only were such shoppers intimidated by the self- service touchscreen checkouts, she gave the example of a man who visited his local supermarket only when he knew a ‘chatty’ till attendant would be working: ‘having someone recognise him . . . ask him how he is’.

And yet, as the Saga report noted, even upmarket chains such as Waitrose and Marks & Spencer are following the likes of Tesco and Wh Smith into mass-automation at check-outs.

Much of this is down to technological advances. But the signals by all political parties that they will consistently raise the minimum wage by more than inflation is the biggest possible incentive for retailers to shed labour and invest in the technology which replaces humans with machines. It was in the run-up to the last general election in 2015 that the then Chancellor, George osborne, pledged to increase the minimum wage by 11 per cent.

This was an electioneering ruse, to cut the ground from beneath labour’s feet; and it pre- empted the deliberations of the low Pay Commission, which had warned that a dramatic increase in the national minimum wage would be no good for employment at the lower end of the pay scale.

As the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman observed: ‘A minimum wage law is, in reality, a law that makes it illegal for an employer to hire a person with limited skills.’

This point has been brought home by the loss of a legal case by Mencap. on Friday, the charity was unsuccessful in an appeal against a ruling by her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. HMRC had said Mencap had broken the minimum wage law by paying a support worker £29.05 for a nine-hour sleep-in shift (equivalent to £3.23 an hour).

It has been common practice for care providers to pay those who ‘sleep in’ with clients a flat rate, plus the minimum wage for the time when the carer has been roused to help the person they support.

This test case involved a carer who had been roused just six times in 16 months to help a resident in the house where she did sleep-ins. HMRC determined that this carer should have been paid the full minimum wage for all her hours of sleep, and that all such employees — throughout the care industry — should be given back-pay covering the past six years. Mencap’s director of services has responded: ‘ This judgment could leave the organisation in financial crisis, at worst leading to insolvency and at best we may have to consider moving out of providing services altogether, which would create huge job uncertainty for our colleagues. We are sleepwalking into a complete collapse of social care for some of the people who need it most.’

Mencap, as its name suggests, cares for those with learning disabilities, but the same argument applies to the whole of the adult care sector. homes for the elderly will simply close. The Government will say it recently gave an extra ‘emergency’ £2 billion for the social care budget: but if that all goes to pay increased mandatory wages for existing staff, it won’t even begin to address the rise in the number of the very old, which requires an actual expansion of such services.

oddly, Mencap doesn’t seem to understand the problem the rapid rise in mandatory minimum wages causes for the employment prospects of the learningdisabled — the very people they are supposed to be helping.

Devastating

My wife, Rosa Monckton, founded Team domenica, a charity to get young men and women with learning disabilities into paid employment: but when she argued that the rapid increase in the minimum wage was a significant barrier to employers taking on such young people — because firms can’t pay more than the value of a person’s output — Mencap’s head of policy publicly criticised her.

This needs to be discussed more widely: labour’s most promoted pledge for the coming general election will be to increase the minimum wage from its current level of £7.50 (for those over 25) to £10 an hour. Indeed, labour is pledging the same £10 an hour for anyone over 18 (currently it’s £5.60 for 18 to 20, and £7.05 for 21 to 24).

The effect of such a policy would be to damage young and old alike: the young because they will be increasingly priced out of the labour market, and the old because it will have a devastating effect on the cost of adult social care provision.

And, of course, it will only accelerate the onward march of those infernal automated check-outs.