Key Findings
- Several organisations said they have struggled to raise staff salaries in line with inflation.
- Organisations described challenges retaining staff, often due to relatively low salaries they are able to pay or the challenging nature of the work.
- There are significant concerns about how to cover increase to employers’ National Insurance Contributions.
- Working with high-need individuals, often in challenging environments, can be highly demanding for voluntary sector staff. Some organisations provide clinical supervision or other measures to support staff.
- Organisations are employing or involving people with lived experience. Some see significant scope for the criminal justice system to better involve people with lived experience.
- Many organisations reported problems with the vetting of staff and volunteers, particularly those with lived experience.
Some organisations noted difficulties in recruiting staff, variously linking these to salary level, the nature of the work, the cost of living in the area in which their organisation was based, competition for workers in their sub-sector, challenges with vetting, difficulties in finding workers with holistic skills, and a shrinking pool of applicants. Others noted that staff they had been able to recruit were a little less experienced than they had expected.
Participants described problems retaining staff, often due to relatively low salaries they were able to pay or to the challenging nature of the work:
We've consistently got key workers staying for around a year to gain the experience in the sector, and then they'll move on somewhere that's more high paying.
Retention difficulties also arose from short-term funding, a post-Covid trend of employees expecting more from their employers, and a younger workforce perhaps less interested in staying with an employer for a long period of time.
Some organisations described losing staff to the probation service or the NHS; they foresaw this worsening as a result of the planned new probation posts and the increase to employer national insurance contributions (NICs). This increase to employer NICs mean they would struggle to raise staff salaries as the same rate as public sector employers.
Other participants described good retention rates, with one noting that they paid better than other similar charities. Measures to improve retention were discussed, including more flexible working hours, team building, and recruiting via degree apprenticeships.
There is a regional dimension to recruitment and retention challenges. London and Bristol based organisations cited the high costs of accommodation, while a national organisation reported getting more, and higher quality, job applications in the North of England, compared to the South, where often 'everything gets sucked into London'.
Organisations discussed the challenges of raising staff salaries in line with inflation, with several noting that they had been unable to do this each year. Some had pursued particular strategies to help staff financially, such as giving staff on lower salaries a bigger proportional increase, issuing loans, paying petrol costs in advance, introducing health insurance packages and employing a welfare worker to support staff to increase their income. Three organisations reported undertaking regular salary benchmarking exercises and said they paid better than other similar charities or had increased some staff salaries as a result of their findings. Several noted their significant concerns about the rise in employer NICs and how they would be able to cover these:
I mean obviously we're dreading the NI thing. Yeah. I mean, we have tried to keep up with inflation. We're a tiny team … and we've tried not to be pitching at the very lowest end of the market. … And the thing that's coming down the track at us is very daunting I think.
This further pressure to voluntary organisations’ finances comes after we have seen, in our surveys, respondents continually highlighting increased running costs for their organisations. In 2023, 78% of respondents said their running costs rose in 2022-23, with 47% saying they rose significantly. This followed findings from our 2022 research that 75% of organisations faced increased running costs in 2021-22, with 35% saying they had risen significantly.
In our focus groups this year, an infrastructure organisation noted that, among the community organisations they worked with, many staff had taken on another job to make ends meet; one organisation representative that we spoke to had done the same. This finding comes as a particular concern, in light of the other pressures that organisations described about staff recruitment, retention and wellbeing. One organisation which does not employ staff mentioned the ‘hidden contribution’ of its volunteers not claiming expenses.
Many organisations talked about the demanding nature of the work that staff, particularly frontline staff, were doing. A couple of people we spoke to who were doing frontline work for very small organisations described the profound effect that it had on them:
I've got severe, complex PTSD because of the work that I've been doing … I've had to take a couple of months out to try and assess my own personal situation.
One issue for me in the last year, which quite simply is safeguarding me. Now, this is not my first rodeo by any stretch of the imagination, and I've been around the block a few times. And certainly, I would say that working in a high security prison in the last year has tipped over for me the manageable bit into really quite worrying. … The witnessing trauma, working in a hard environment. … [A] realisation that my coping strategies … [are] not enough for this kind of work in this kind of place at the moment.
Several of the organisations we spoke to had introduced or extended clinical supervision, in-house counselling, or trauma-informed training for their staff to help staff cope with their work with service users with complex needs. Representatives from two other organisations mentioned accessing, or planning to access, external professional support.
In one focus group, a couple of organisations discussed the increased prevalence of home working since the pandemic. They felt staff had more time to ‘ruminate about issues’, sometimes leading to an increase in grievances being raised, coinciding with a reluctance to initiate disciplinary processes in short-staffed organisations. One concluded that ‘general standards of behaviour are gradually being eroded’.
Many organisations reported problems with the vetting of staff and volunteers, particularly of those with lived experience. Problems included: the process taking many months; vetted individuals finding the process traumatising or intrusive; organisations losing people that they wanted to employ, or potential volunteers, because of the length or nature of the process; organisations employing people or engaging volunteers who can’t start the work they’ve been recruited for until a lengthy vetting process is completed; individuals not getting clearance or experiencing delays in getting clearance, often for reasons that appeared unnecessarily stringent; inconsistencies in who is cleared; and prisons not accepting digital document submissions.
Organisations were frustrated that these difficulties were experienced at the same time as they were being encouraged by the Government and funders to employ people with lived experience:
We've lost a couple of people to vetting for reasons I personally think are ridiculous. That doesn't seem to have got any better. But people keep saying they want people with lived experience involved.
Many organisations we spoke to had employed people with lived experience, or involved them in their work, with others saying that they had plans to do so. Several noted an increasing interest in this type of work. One organisation described how someone who they worked with whilst they were in prison came up with an idea for an employment programme; the organisation employed him to develop the programme on his release and it is now successfully running in six prisons.
Three organisations argued that there was significant scope for the criminal justice system to improve its approach to involving people with lived experience:
If the system listens to the people in it, they tend to give them the solutions they're looking for. … [The criminal justice system is] not listening properly to the people. It's not listening to where it can make efficiencies. It's not listening to where it can really help people and make a difference.
One organisation argued that the youth justice system had made better progress in this regard. In addition, a couple of organisations observed that the patient voice is being more effectively integrated into the health service that the voices of people with lived experience are into the criminal justice system.
As noted above, vetting was a barrier to involving people with lived experience. A couple of very small organisations mentioned that, while they valued the involvement of people with lived experience, it was inappropriate to use their time for unpaid or low paid work when they could find higher paid work elsewhere. One had reduced the amount of face-to-face delivery work their organisation did in order that the people with lived experience undertaking this work could find other jobs, explaining ‘I felt guilty, I felt like I was holding them back’.
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