The Fair Work Agency launched on 7th April 2026 with a clear and welcome purpose: to bring together labour market enforcement functions, give workers one place to raise concerns and help employers understand what compliance looks like. Homecare workers deserve that protection. The new agency will have stronger powers, a wider remit and, over time, a more joined-up approach to enforcing minimum wage, holiday pay and statutory sick pay. But there is a hard question at the heart of this reform. Can the Fair Work Agency have a meaningful impact in a market where public bodies often purchase care in ways that make fair work difficult to sustain?
First, some facts. Homecare Association research shows that 29% of councils and NHS bodies pay fee rates below the direct employment cost of a care worker at minimum wage. The average council fee rate is around £24 per hour, while our calculated Minimum Price for Homecare from April 2026 is £34.42. Only 1% of public body contracts meet the threshold for safe, sustainable, regulated care. Yet price is only part of the problem. In many places, homecare is purchased in highly fragmented ways: small packages of care spread across too many providers, with too little volume in each neighbourhood to support efficient rotas, and secure employment and payment for all working time.
Even where headline fee rates appear less obviously inadequate, hyper-fragmentation can still make fair work unachievable in practice. Inadequate hours, rota gaps and substantial travel, on top of below-cost fee rates, make it hard to guarantee secure income and fair pay.
This matters because the Employment Rights Act raises expectations and responsibilities in the workplace. Day-one statutory sick pay, guaranteed hours reforms and the move towards a Fair Pay Agreement are all intended to strengthen workers’ rights. We support that direction. Care workers deserve fair treatment, proper security and payment for all legal working time.
Regulation on its own cannot ensure workers’ rights. If councils and NHS commissioners continue purchasing homecare by the minute, at rates and through contract models that fail to cover travel time, waiting time, training, supervision and other essential costs, providers face an impossible choice: non-compliance, service withdrawal or insolvency. I raised this directly with Fair Work Agency leadership during a stakeholder broadcast in March. Chair Matthew Taylor acknowledged the structural problem and indicated that homecare will be among the sectors prioritised as the agency develops its work programme. That is important. But thought leadership alone will not change the underlying economics or commissioning design.
Baroness Casey’s independent commission on adult social care reform has confronted the wider failure directly. Speaking at the Nuffield Trust Summit in March, she described a national reliance on underpaying care workers, 78% of whom are women. A third of councils know they pay below the rate required to cover the minimum wage. She called it irresponsible for Government to give people new rights without taking responsibility for whether those rights can be fulfilled. That challenge now applies directly to fair work in homecare.
The Fair Work Agency’s formal role is to enforce employment law, not to set commissioning or procurement policy. If Government is serious about improving employment conditions for workers, ministers must create the conditions for it: realistic fee rates, payment for all working time, less fragmented commissioning and accountability for commissioners, not only providers. This is why we need a national contract for care services: a framework for minimum price, workforce standards and shared accountability running through the whole system. Without that, the Fair Work Agency risks policing the consequences of a broken system rather than helping to build a fair one.
Dr Jane Townson OBE is Chief Executive Officer at the Homecare Association.
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