The former UK health secretary Jeremy Hunt is to urge ministers to rethink the payment of home care workers by the minute, after MPs were told it was demoralising for staff on the coronavirus frontline. Care bosses told the Commons health and social care select committee the practice – which can involve the use of electronic tags – must stop and the nation’s 1.6 million adult social care workers afforded higher status and pay in line with NHS nurses. Payment by the minute applies to some of the UK’s 685,000 home care workers who go from house to house looking after sick and elderly people. It means they are not paid for travel or training. “Can you imagine a clinical commissioning group saying to an NHS trust we are only going to pay nurses every minute they are by a patient’s bedside and we are going to electronically tag them to find out when they are there?” said Dr Jane Townson, the chief executive of the United Kingdom Homecare Association. “But we are not going to pay them when they are moving from one patient’s bed to the next. Can you imagine the outcry?” Raina Summerson, the chief executive of Agincare, a company specialising in home care, also criticised the practice, which she said was a result of restricted public funds for home care services. “Who would have thought that this critical role of compassion and care could be broken down to paying people by the minute and having people … not be paid for when they are walking up someone’s garden path.” In response, Hunt, who chairs the committee, said: “I think it is something we need to talk to ministers about. When I was health secretary, I was told 15-minute visits had been abolished, but it feels like they haven’t. It is definitely something we need to look into.” The MPs also heard that burnout and post-traumatic stress disorder resulting from the strain placed on social care during the Covid-19 pandemic is likely to lead many care workers to quit. At least 16,620 people have died from Covid-19 in UK care homes, figures show, when Tuesday’s latest official statistics for England and Wales are added to figures for Scotland and Northern Ireland. The committee heard there were 122,000 vacancies in the UK care workforce before Covid-19, with an additional 140,000 recruits forecast to be needed by 2024 to meet the rising demand of an ageing population. Care workers told MPs they had been overlooked in favour of their NHS counterparts during the Covid-19 crisis, with Mel Cairnduff, a care worker for Agincare, complaining they were “tutted” at by members of the public for wearing their uniforms in the street. The Labour MP Barbara Keeley said she was “appalled at that because you are doing such a valuable job … care staff have really stepped up in this pandemic … they should feel proud.” Low rates of pay also need to be improved, care bosses said. “We need to come away from this time and task, paying by the minute and treating care workers like commodities,” said Townson. She said paying home care workers the national minimum wage of £8.72 an hour cost care providers £14.89 an hour once statutory on-costs such as national insurance, sick pay and holiday were added. Yet some councils were paying £14.41 an hour. “How can that be right?” she asked. “That’s not even a legal level.” “We are seen as the underdogs and the Cinderellas,” said Sue Ann Balcombe, the manager of the Priscilla Wakefield House, a dementia nursing home in Tottenham, north London. “I don’t see that the nurses get the same respect they get in the NHS and yet they have such a wide range of knowledge and skills … It’s the pandemic that has highlighted how much the care homes do to support the public and the NHS.”