A Firm which delivers home care to elderly and vulnerable people in Carmarthenshire is being investigated by HM Revenue & Customs Village Home Care is alleged to have attempted to circumvent rules governing the minimum wage by grossly misrepresenting the time required to travel between client visits.
In order to meet the time requirements for travelling between different clients, it is claimed that carers had to cut short visits because of ludicrous expectations that travelling between rural clients located many kilometres apart would take only five minutes.
In a programme on BBC Radio 4, carers said that one visit was 16 miles (26km) from the last, a journey time of 25 minutes.
Although Mitie, which owns the firm of which Village Home Care is a part, said it is carrying out its own investigation, The Herald understands that MiHomeCare is under investigation for further breaches of minimum w age rules.
The rules provide that care companies are obliged to count time travelling between client appointments as part of employees’ working days. A review of MiHomeCare has revealed that some workers were not being paid for travelling time.
Under-estimating travel time between appointments seems to be a way of attempting to further circumvent the rules.
In the Radio 4 programme, former MiHomeCare employees refer to the practice of cutting short visits to make time between appointments as ‘clipping’.
Emma, one of the former employees interviewed went on to say: “Bear in mind that for some of them we are the only people they spoke to in that day.”
Her former colleague Clare said: “Some people used to say ‘small wash today we haven’t got time’ and you’d say ‘We need to do a full wash’. This person is going to be in bed until lunchtime maybe. You have to give them a full wash.”
A critical report by Care and Social Services Inspectorate Wales (CSSIW) Village Home Care Services (Wales) Ltd, noted that the company routinely and uniformly allocated five minutes between calls in cities and towns but failed to change that time allocation for rural visits. Other criticisms of the firm included notifications that the business was non-compliant with its obligations on staff training, non-compliant with the requirement to have a quality monitoring system or have in place an annual quality of care report. A further recommendation is made that the company must ensure that care is not started without a proper care assessment being carried out and reviewed regularly.
The report also sets out that staff feel pressured to work lengthy hours in excess of the legal limit of 48 hours per week and have insufficient time between shifts.
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