Chamber and committees

Since 2016, the Scottish Government has provided funding to ensure that adult social care workers, delivering direct care in commissioned services, are paid at least the Real Living Wage (RLW). This pay uplift has been extended to workers delivering direct care to children and young people in commissioned services for the first time this financial year. We have transferred £230 million to Local Government to deliver this £12 minimum wage for adult social care workers and a further £20 million has been transferred to support the uplift for children’s social care workers.

The Scottish Government is proud to be leading the way in increasing minimum hourly rates of pay for the social care workforce among the four UK nations.

We are working in partnership with key stakeholders – including trade unions, providers and COSLA – to introduce sectoral bargaining for the commissioned adult social care sector. Once developed and introduced, sectoral bargaining will encourage improvements in pay, and terms and conditions, and also take into consideration the varied roles and responsibilities across the sector.

The Scottish Government and our partners are also taking action to promote social care roles as an attractive career, support routes in to the sector, and enable career development.

In collaboration with COSLA, we established the Joint Social Services Taskforce (JSST) to address priority workforce issues. One of the JSST Workstreams led by the Scottish Social Services Council and NHS Education for Scotland, is the development of a new Career Opportunities Tool to map the range of roles and careers on offer in social care, and potential pathways open to new and existing staff.