Our Mission is the realisation of a new social contract for care, that values family carers and care workers, reverses the creeping privatisation of social care services, and delivers a new fair deal for older people.

A New Fair Deal for Care

Labour Will:

• Legislate for a statutory home support service and strong regulatory framework.
• Reorientate policy to public provision of home support and publish annual targets to progressively increase the proportion of home support hours provided directly by the HSE.
• Ensure enough funding is in place to meet demand for home support and directly hire more health care support assistants in the HSE.
• Put in place a long-term plan to increase the provision of public long term residential care by investing in new community nursing homes.
• Support the expansion of alternative models of long-term care such as the Housing with Supports scheme.

Valuing Care Workers

Labour will value care workers in the home support and nursing home sectors and initiate a plan to in-source these services with more direct recruitment by the HSE, and provision of publicly run community long-term residential care.

We will:

• Ensure health care support assistants are paid a living wage, mileage expenses and travel time between care locations along with guaranteed hours and continuity of income.
• Introduce a commitment in outsourced contracts under the HSE Authorisation Scheme for home support and the Fair Deal scheme that providers engage in collective bargaining.
• Establish Joint Labour Committees to negotiate Fair Pay Agreements with binding minimum rates of pay to address recruitment and retention challenges and ring-fenced state funding for both home care (HCSAs) and nursing home HCAs.