Westminster Council plans extra funding for care assistants

A disability campaigner has praised Westminster Council for putting an extra £1.4mn into funding for care assistants, as part of its budget proposals for the new financial year.

Colin Hughes, 59, said the extra money for personal care assistants’ pay will help make the role competitive, and attractive to new employees.

Hughes, who writes about disability for the news site Aestumanda, relies on a personal assistant due to his muscular dystrophy condition. He said the increase — which is expected to be between £1.50 and £2 an hour — could lure people away from employers which traditionally offer a higher wage than the caring sector. He said Brexit and an under-appreciation of carers in society has made finding and retaining an assistant more difficult.

“Every disabled person will tell you it’s very hard to recruit social care workers for two reasons. One is Brexit, which has seen a lot of people leave the city in the last few years and the second reason is because British people aren’t that interested in a career in social care.

“But this payment will make it easier to attract people to work with me”, he says.

Under the plans, direct payment recipients will receive a flat rate of £20 an hour, much of which the council said will be paid directly to assistants in the form of earnings.

Recipients of direct payments are provided a lump sum from the council for their care, which is based on their level of need. This form of funding is said to give disabled residents greater say over how their care is administered by allowing them to hire their own assistants.

Direct payment recipients are classed as employers and therefore must also cover other fixed expenses like National Insurance and pension contributions. When those are taken into account, a disabled person needing 21 hours a week of care will be able to pay their assistant £15.80 an hour — an almost £2 jump from their current London Living Wage of £13.85, according to the council.

Those receiving 16 hours a week of care will be able to pay their assistant £15.72 an hour. This is expected to impact 400 assistants in the borough.

Nafsika Butler-Thalassis, the cabinet member for adult social care and public health, said she thinks increasing workers’ pay will lead to better quality care and stability.

“You can hire somebody who does a good job and won’t leave because you’re paying them a competitive salary. We have found the same thing with the pay increase we did last year so we think it will work the same way for people using direct payments.

“Also, if people are getting better quality of care, that has a preventive element and you hope they will therefore stay well for longer and that would be a benefit to the council, because they wouldn’t deteriorate and need more hours of care.”

Last year, Westminster Council increased the pay of agency care staff by £1.50 an hour.

For Hughes, who has lived in a wheelchair since his teens, getting the right care can be the difference between life and death.

The former BBC producer, who has lived in Westminster since the 1990s, said: “If you work in a restaurant and break a plate, it’s not the end of the world but if you are being hoisted into bed by an incompetent carer, or someone who doesn’t have the confidence, then it’s very dangerous. Your life is in their hands every single day.”

Council tax increase and £20mn in ‘savings’

The council is also promising an extra £1.2mn to level up the threshold at which people start paying for their social care costs. Some 460 residents aged under 65 with disabilities will be able to keep at least £272.69 a week after they have paid their care bills.

Westminster Council has also announced:

• £140mn into buying and maintaining temporary accommodation properties;
• An extra £1.2mn to tackle rough sleeping;
• An additional £1mn on cost-of-living support;
• £2mn in funding to tackle anti-social behaviour (ASB) — including doubling the number of CCTV cameras to 200, creating a new team to combat anti-social behaviour and recruiting extra officers to fight noise nuisance.

The council said installing up to 40 new cameras in the West End — focusing on Soho and Leicester Square — is the most significant council security investment in the area in nearly a decade

The local authority is also proposing £20mn in cuts to its budget — a figure set to increase to £30mn by 2028, according to the council. Council tax will increase by 4.99 percent with two percent of that going towards adult social care.

From the 2025-2026 financial year, a Band D property will pay an extra £25.04 a year — an equivalent weekly amount of 48p. The council said the borough still has one of the lowest council tax rates in the country.

The amount paid to the Greater London Authority on a Band D property has also increased by £18.98 a year. In total, these residents will now pay £1,017.18 a year.

The council’s final settlement from the central government saw a 6.8 percent cash boost. Despite this, the council forecasts a gap of £41.2mn over the next two years.

Among the measures to cut £20mn, the council will:

• Save £2mn from adult and children’s services. Some £500k will come from continuing prevention initiatives while another £550k will come from ensuring residents receive Continuing Healthcare funding from the NHS and charging homecare costs for those previously admitted to hospital under the Mental Health Act;
• Some £8mn will come from the environment and communities portfolio, a large chunk of which — £5.2mn — is expected to come from parking charges, fines and fees;
• £5.9mn from housing and commercial partnership.

Westminster’s Cabinet approved the measures on Monday 17 February and it will now be put to a vote during a full council meeting on 5 March 2025.

Westminster Council, Cabinet: Monday 17 February 2025.

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