Joint and Several Liability arrives in April 2026. For the caring and staffing sector, it’s long overdue.
This article was written by Toby Gavin, director of We Are Care.
Something has bothered me since the first time I saw it on a competitor’s rate card. A flat-rate agency fee so low it defies basic arithmetic. Accepted by procurement teams who likely never stopped to ask what sits beneath that number. But I did. Because we do.
Run the maths. The National Living Wage rose to £12.21 in April 2025 and moves again to £12.71 from April 2026. Add employer National Insurance at 15%, and you’re already at around £14.65 before factoring in holiday pay accrual (approximately 12.07% for a worker without fixed hours), pension auto-enrolment, and sick pay. By the time you’ve accounted for the real cost of employment, some of the rates we’ve seen in the market leave around 33 pence of margin per hour to cover compliance, recruitment, vetting, DBS checks, insurance, and the actual operation of a business.
Thirty-three pence. That’s not a business model. It’s a mathematical impossibility. Unless something is giving.
We built We Are Care on this question, not as a route to personal gain, or a way of reducing what’s owed to the country that has supported us all our lives. Our ambition is straightforward: pay our care team fairly, charge our partners honestly, and build something the sector can actually be proud of.
The price of care that few want to pay
According to Skills for Care’s 2025 workforce report, the median pay for a care worker in the independent sector was £12 an hour, with an estimated 23% paid the National Living Wage or up to just 10p above it. Nearly a quarter of the care workforce earning the absolute legal floor, not a penny more.
Research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) found that as of March 2024, 40% of adult social care workers in England were paid below the Real Living Wage, not a campaigning aspiration but the independently calculated figure of what it actually costs to live.
A joint report by the Health Foundation and the Nuffield Trust found that care workers earn on average £4.88 per hour less than the UK average wage, and that workers with significant experience are paid only eight pence more per hour than new starters.
Meanwhile, according to the Homecare Association, a third of councils are paying providers less than £22.71 per hour, the minimum calculated as necessary to meet direct employment costs under the National Living Wage.
What’s really happening at the bottom of the market?
When I look at agencies operating on the margins we’ve seen on competitor rate cards, I see only a handful of possibilities. None of them are comfortable.
The first is compliance failure, not through malice necessarily, but through wilful ignorance. Corners are being cut on compliance infrastructure. No meaningful DBS checks. No genuine safer recruitment framework. Bodies placed, box ticked, invoice raised.
Or, and this is the one nobody wants to say out loud, cash in hand. The Health Foundation and Nuffield Trust estimate around 15% of low-paid social care staff are paid less than the National Living Wage. Some of that is structural. Some of it is not. According to the government’s National Minimum Wage Enforcement Report for 2024/25, HMRC opened 5,200 new cases that year, with around 1,200 resulting in workers being paid arrears. And those are only the cases that made it through the door.
Enter Joint and Several Liability
From 6th April 2026, the landscape changes. According to Care England, new legislation imposing joint and several liability for PAYE and National Insurance in temporary labour supply chains ‘will introduce significant new risks to users of such workers, and health and social care providers will be firmly in scope.’
Bishopsgate Pay summarise it plainly: ‘JSL is designed to ensure that all parties in a labour supply chain can be held accountable for unpaid tax and non-compliance, not just the party directly paying the worker.’
In plain English: if you’re a provider using agency staff, and that agency hasn’t been paying its workers correctly, hasn’t been paying the right PAYE, hasn’t been meeting NI or holiday obligations, you can now be held liable. Not the agency, but you.
The care provider who has spent years congratulating their procurement team on cheap agency fill now carries a new kind of exposure, one they didn’t budget for and can’t pass upstream. The Homecare Association put it best in response to the government’s minimum wage naming round: ‘Commissioning at below-cost rates creates the conditions for unsafe care and labour exploitation. Below-cost commissioning does not excuse non-compliance. If you cannot pay legal wages at the rates offered, you should not accept the contract.’
What We Are Care stands for, and what good looks like
We started We Are Care because we believed the sector deserved better. Our carers are paid above the Real Living Wage, calculated independently by the Living Wage Foundation as what people actually need to live, not the statutory minimum. According to the Living Wage Foundation, over 400,000 adult social care workers in England are currently paid below that threshold.
Good, looks like charging rates that genuinely cover the cost of compliant employment, somewhere north of £19 per hour in 2026 before a responsible agency makes any margin at all. According to the JRF, low pay already costs the sector through staff taking a median of 8.6 sick days per year against a UK average of 5.7, and Skills for Care calculate that every £1 invested in social care generates £1.75 in the wider economy. The business case for paying properly isn’t just ethical. It’s financial.
JSL isn’t the whole answer. Proper sector funding, fair local authority commissioning, the Fair Pay Agreement and the oversight of the new Fair Work Agency all need to play their part. The Fair Pay Agreement, currently in development under the Employment Rights Act, will establish minimum pay, terms and conditions for care workers across England, with the first agreement due to be settled around 2028-29. The Fair Work Agency, launching April 2026, brings together existing enforcement functions including NMW compliance under one body, with expanding powers over time to cover holiday pay, sick pay and wider employment rights. Together they represent the most significant structural intervention in care sector employment in a generation. But JSL is the first mechanism in a long time that makes the consequences of looking away real for the people who’ve been doing the looking.
The low rates circulating in this market didn’t just shortchange care workers. They shortchanged the sector. They shortchanged care quality. From April 2026, they will start shortchanging the providers who chose them.
That is the reckoning this sector has needed. Or is it?
Images: Toby Gavin and Georg Arthur Pflueger/UnSplash
In related news:
Integrated care: why social care is the missing piece of the jigsaw
Rethinking social care through the lens of neurodivergent carers
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