I am confused. You say the staff will still have the same hours, that the hourly rate will increase and you will take away travel payments. So in totality are staff better or worst off!?

I am assuming worst off as you are trying to save money. Do it’s best not to try and dress this up as anything other than it is.

You have contracts with the staff. You can only vary these contracts by consulting and reaching agreement , or terminating the existing contracts and offering/imposing a new one.

Moving someone from salaries to zero hours is frankly such a fundamental change that it’s hard to see why anyone other than the most desperate would accept such a change. So you maybe in the situation where after consultation you need to fire and rehire. Which us a risky strategy but maybe your only one.

There is an argument over if redundancy applies as work of a particular kind may have ceased or diminished ( although the overal volume of work clearly hasn’t). So you at least need to be prepared for that debate.

On a side issue I find it totally incomprehensible that the only way to deliver savings is to cut the income of the workers. Who I would guess are already not hugely remunerated. It’s a sad reflection on the state of social care in the uk. Inevitably we all get old and it’s not looking great is it?

Keith is exactly right.

Assuming you have exhausted all other options and there is no other alternative, you need to begin consultations as soon as possible. This will be a painful, difficult process. There will be denial, anger, tears and threats (and that's just the management). You will need to be open to alternatives and willing to hear feedback whilst, at the same time, pressing forward as urgently as possible with your plans to prevent your current losses from spiralling. You should plan to lose a chunk of your staff very quickly as they jump to other, better jobs. But, having worked in the care industry, I suspect you might be surprised by how few that is. All the same, you should make recruitment plan to back-fill the jumpers as quickly and efficiently as you can, bringing new people on board on the new contracts.

You should also take into account that zero-hours contracts aren't a panacea and are in the cross hairs for various political groups to make them illegal, so in the medium term you should also ask yourselves if any other solution could be made to work should that come about.

Hi Gemma

Would it be possible to look across the organisation for savings rather than simply at the team that works on that particular contract? After all, it wasn’t any of the care assistants that bid for a contract that didn’t cover employment costs. Would management be willing to take a percentage cut to their salaries rather than reducing the pay of one of the worst paid groups in British society?

As an aside, I am aware that in some parts of the country care agencies are very dependent on migrant workers because rates of pay are so low. If this is true of your organisation, do you have a contingency plan in place in case, post Brexit, you can’t attract staff with such terrible terms?

To add to the excellent advice you have had already, i would just sound a bit of an alarm on the point about pay for travel time. Under the minimum wage regulations, travel time between appointments is classed at working time, so although you are putting the rate up, you are also putting yourself at risk of breaching minimum wage regulations. Do you currently pay more than the minimum wage? If you don't then you are already paying them the minimum you can.

This sounds a bit of a daft approach by the business and quite possibly likely to cause more problems than it solves

In reply to Teresa:

Zero hours may be going too far. variable hours may make more economic and human sense