What are bank and agency temporary care staff? Some care-home providers employ a bank of care workers who are available to send into short-staffed homes. They are often employed on zero-hours contracts, work across several homes in one area and make up about 10% of the social care workforce. Agency care workers are also paid by the day and tend to earn slightly more than staff, who on average receive just £8.10 per hour – less than shop workers and cleaners. Care homes are three times more likely to rely on staff supplied by agencies than other parts of the labour market, according to the Office for National Statistics labour force survey. Why are they needed? Care homes went into the Covid-19 crisis with about 120,000 vacancies. The low pay and lack of prestige associated with the job has made recruitment hard. This is partly down to low levels of public funding for social care, which have fallen in real terms over the last decade. Tight margins for operators mean that using zero-hours and temporary workers is more attractive in business terms than having surplus permanent staff. Eighty percent of care workers are women and the average age is 43, so they often have responsibilities looking after children and elderly parents, which can require last-minute shift changes. What has their role been during the pandemic? Care homes have been beset by staff absences, with up to 25% of workers having to self-isolate during the peak weeks of the crisis. The national volunteering push focused on asking people to help the NHS, so care providers have turned to agency and bank staff. Care UK, a chain of homes which has lost 586 residents to confirmed or suspected Covid-19, said it used agency staff as “a last resort to avoid falling short of safe staffing levels”. Bupa, which has lost 198 residents to confirmed cases, also used agency staff but said it asked them to first confirm they did not have symptoms and had not been in an environment with confirmed or suspected cases in the last two weeks. However, the Public Health England study of care homes found evidence that asymptomatic staff were passing on the virus. How easy will it be for care homes to operate without them? Testing of asymptomatic care home staff, which is becoming more widespread, will increase absences, so the need for temporary staff will grow in the short term. HC-One, the UK’s largest provider of private care homes, which has had 903 residents die from confirmed or suspected Covid-19, said it had “begun to allocate bank staff to a home so they are not moving from home to home”. It has also started talks over the exclusive use of agency staff, but these are not finalised. It has 24,000 staff, but 1,500 are already off work because of the pandemic. Recruitment campaigns are under way to find more permanent staff from the hospitality and retail sectors where unemployment has soared. But care leaders argue it will take time, better pay and training to reduce vacancies and create a more stable workforce.