Care at home sector overtakes residential care as employer for second year running

Caremark franchisees along with the rest of the sector are employing more people to care for clients in their own homes as their businesses continue to expand

Recent new data from Skills for Care revealed sustained sector employment growth, and according to the organisation’s latest Size and Structure of the Adult Workforce in England update, the vast majority of the increase in adult social care jobs during the pandemic was in CQC regulated non-residential care services, including Caremark, which increased by 40,000 jobs or 7 per cent.

The number of care home jobs remained broadly the same over the same period despite decreases in occupancy rates from 86 per cent pre-COVID to 77 per cent in March 2021.

Skills for Care CEO Oonagh Smyth said: “Thanks to the continued support of thousands of social care employers who kept supplying their data through the pandemic we are able to publish our annual analysis. This gives a real sense of not only how big our sector is, but also the impact of the pandemic on the workforce which has done so much to keep the people they work with safe and well.”

Analysis of figures from employers supplied to the Adult Social Care Workforce data set also showed that the number of jobs in care homes for older people remained similar in 2020-21, but between March and June 2021 there is evidence that the number of jobs in this part of the sector had started to decrease.

The number of people working in adult social care was estimated at 1.54 million in 2020-21. The data also reveals that if the adult social care workforce grows proportionally to the projected number of people aged 65 and over in the population then the number of adult social care jobs will increase by 29 per cent, or 480,000 jobs, to around 2.16 million jobs by 2035.