Clean Cars for Carers: Enabling rural care workers to switch to electric cars
Unless they’re working in dense cities, home care workers usually rely on their cars to visit their elderly, unwell or Disabled clients, and travelling between visits each day can clock up over 1,000 miles a month.
Most care workers use their own car to do their job, and mileage policies often don’t cover the rising cost of fuel, or non-fuel costs like maintenance. These high-running costs are contributing to pushing more and more care workers out of the sector, at a time when recruitment and retention is more important than ever.
We’ve teamed up with The Care Workers Charity and New Automotive to call for the government to establish a social leasing scheme for care workers, offering them electric vehicles (EV) at a lower cost while cutting emissions.
This report argues that:
Supporting domiciliary care workers to switch to electric vehicles would yield very high returns in emissions reductions, and also much lower running costs for some of the least well paid workers in Britain (with some able to save nearly £1,000 a year on fuel).
A government-backed social leasing policy would be a sensible model to deliver such a scheme. Many UK households have to take out loans to get a car, which is particularly troubling for care workers, who are some of the lowest-paid workers in the UK. They risk being pushed into debt or being subject to ‘poverty premiums’, where prices are inflated because they can’t afford high deposits. A government-backed social leasing scheme would ensure that care workers can access an electric car at a lower cost while reducing their transport emissions. The government would act as a guarantor for the people leasing the cars, hugely decreasing the risk to the lender and therefore decreasing the cost or interest rate of the loan.
A scheme like this has already been introduced in France, where low-income, high-mileage workers can lease an EV for €100 per month, covering the cost of the car as well as insurance and maintenance. (Applications for this scheme have just been suspended until 2025 because it’s been so popular!). A similar scheme in the UK, targeted at low-income, high-mileage essential workers, would be a win-win-win-win for social care, the climate, the economy, and for social justice – aiding in a just transition to net zero.