The Court of Appeal has made a ruling on Sleep in payments.

The court found in favour of Mencap so this means that national minimum wage does not apply when a support worker is sleeping.
Learning Disability England has been part of the #SolveSleepIns Alliance to try and find a solution to this problem.

Here is the statement from the alliance. For providers of support and personal budget holders who directly employ support workers, this decision provides some relief for those who would have struggled to pay 6 years of back pay. However it does not solve the main problem that social care is grossly underfunded and those who we expect to perform some of the most important work in our society are living on wages that often do not reflect the important job they do.

We think that not only should support staff be paid fairly to sleep in but that greater investment by the government into social care should mean better rates of pay and conditions more generally.

We support the #SolveSleepIns Alliance call for the government to legislate for improved rates to be paid for sleep ins and that the government commit to funding this properly. At the moment many Personal Budget Holders are not paid equally to service providers and therefore have a disadvantage in some parts of the country in attracting the right support workers and this too needs to be resolved.

Claire Crossley, LDE family representative and personal budget holder says ‘the lack of value and pay for essential care that is the difference between being alive and actually LIVING. We need a national standard procedure that all local authority’s agree to follow so that we have better processes and rates of pay including pensions which is imperative for personal budget holders to operate within the law’

To download the solve sleep in Alliance press release click here

To download the judgement please click here

To download SolveSleepIns-Briefing on the sleep-in crisis please click here