Commissioner of domiciliary (home) care services

This request relates solely to information held by the council in its role as a commissioner of domiciliary (home) care services. It does not seek confirmation of statutory enforcement responsibility under minimum wage legislation.

1. Please provide recorded information held by the council, created or relied upon within the last three financial years, which demonstrates how the council assures itself, in practice, that commissioned domiciliary care providers pay care workers for all working time.

a) For the purposes of this request, 'all working time' includes (but is not limited to):
* Payment for direct contact time with service users
* Payment for travel time between care visits
* Payment for gaps of less than 60 minutes between care visits
* Payment for mileage, including whether contracts specify a mileage rate or reimbursement requirement

The request seeks recorded information held by the council.

b) This may include, but is not limited to:

* Contractual clauses or schedules relating to pay, working time, or reimbursement of expenses
* Monitoring, auditing, or compliance reports
* Payroll sampling, spot checks, or verification exercises (redacted as necessary)
* Records of breaches, enforcement actions, or improvement plans
* Provider declarations or self-certifications relied upon as evidence
* Records showing that compliance is assured through reliance on HMRC enforcement or other external bodies
* Any other documentation used by the council to verify compliance in practice

Clarification
If the council does not hold recorded information for any of the above elements, please explicitly confirm this and state whether:

a) The council does not monitor these matters in practice;
b) Monitoring occurs, but no records are retained;
c) The council relies solely on provider declarations or contractual self-certification; or
d) The council relies on HMRC or another external enforcement body and holds no direct verification records.

Lincolnshire County Council does hold some information relevant to this request; however, this is not held in a centrally collated or payroll verified format.

The Council undertakes ongoing monitoring of commissioned Homecare services through operational systems, including review of Electronic Call Monitoring data.

This includes checks to ensure that travel time is built into rotas and to identify overlapping or unfeasible calls. Where such issues are identified, these are raised with providers for clarification and resolution.

In addition, the Council undertakes periodic provider assurance activity, including requesting information on pay rates and seeking confirmation from providers as to how they ensure compliance with National Minimum Wage requirements, including payment for travel time.

Providers are also asked to evidence how travel time is incorporated and quality assured within their delivery models. This assurance is based on provider declarations and supporting explanations; the Council does not routinely undertake payroll verification or sampling of staff payments.

The Council’s contracts require providers to comply with all relevant employment legislation, including National Minimum Wage requirements, and place responsibility for staff remuneration with the provider as the employer.

The information described above is not held in a single report or dataset and is recorded variably across providers and systems. The Council does not collate this information centrally in a way that would enable extraction within the scope of this request without creating new information.