ILPC 2027

This paper reports on the key findings from a DH funded project to investigate the role of LA commissioning practices and independent sector provider policies on recruitment  and employment conditions in the social care sector for older adults.  The core aim is to contribute to the literature on the role of public procurement and inter-organisational  relations in shaping employment and recruitment outcomes (Marchington et al. 2005; Purcell and Purcell 1998; Cunningham 2009; Cunningham and James 2009; Rubery and Urwin 2010).  The overall findings suggest that while good employment practices are clearly prevented by poor public procurement practices, improvements to public procurement,  particularly where these represent unstable or patchy improvements, may be insufficient to initiate or sustain  significant improvements in HR practices among independent sector providers, where these providers are not under pressure from trade unions or collective regulation to translate better commissioning into better HR practice. Furthermore this failure to translate  improvements into better HR conditions  is found despite continuing problems in the recruitment and retention of care staff, suggesting the important and combined role of government and employers in  the creation and maintenance of low wage employment segments that are not responsive to  standard market pressures for improvement. These findings have major implications for the so-called nudge agenda, contradicting notions that organisations can be simply nudged into improving employment conditions or engagement through demonstrations of better practice and/or through  favourable  environmental conditions.  

The study covers fourteen diverse Local Authorities (LAs) engaged in social care commissioning, over 100 private sector providers within these LAs and ten national chains of providers interviewed at headquarter level. Face to face interviews were held with key commissioning actors in the LAs while the providers were surveyed by telephone.

The paper develops the argument as follows. The LAs were found to be  pursuing somewhat different commissioning strategies  as a consequence of both different and competing agendas  in social care and the impact of political processes at both organisational and the council level. These differences in practices enabled us to distinguish between more partnership oriented, more cost minimising focused and more mixed commissioning approaches. However the positioning of the LAs within these types of commissioning practices is highly unstable due to the conflicting pressures and the rapid pace of change in the commissioning environments. Furthermore when we explored the actual outcomes of these commissioning practices on providers’ HR practices we found that better commissioning practices may results in only marginal improvements to conditions: for example an extra £1 per hour in LA fees only leads to a tendency for an increase in pay of  19 pence per hour despite the fact that in domiciliary care wages are the majority of agency costs. We explore the reasons for these poor employment practices of providers, paying particular attention to the policies adopted by national providers that are coming to  increasingly dominate the social care market. The paper concludes by considering the policy implications of the findings.

Cunningham, I. (2009) ‘A race to the bottom? Exploring variations in employment conditions in the voluntary sector’ Public Administration Vol. 86, No. 4, 2008 (1033–1053)

Cunningham, I.. and James, P. (2009)  ‘The outsourcing of social care in Britain: what does it mean for voluntary sector workers’ Work Employment and Society. 23: 363-375

Marchington, M., Grimshaw, D., Rubery, J., and Wilmott, H. (Eds.) (2005). Fragmenting Work: Blurring organisational boundaries and disordering hierarchies. Oxford. Oxford University Press.

Purcell, K. and Purcell, J. (1999). ‘Insourcing, outsourcing and the growth of contingent labour as evidence of flexible employment strategies’, in R. Blanpain and M. Biagi (eds.), ‘Non-standard Work and Industrial Relations’. Bulletin of Comparative Labour Relations, 35: 163–181.

Rubery J. and Urwin, P. (2010) ‘Bringing the employer back in: why social care needs a standard employment relationship’, Human Resource Management Journal (2010 early view)