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Unison members have voted to step up their campaign against the formation of care trusts.

At the union's local government conference this week they backed a motion rejecting care trust status as the best means of promoting closer working between social care and health staff.

Conference delegates meeting in Bournemouth called on their leaders to promote alternative mechanisms that do not require members to transfer out of local authority employment.

Earlier Owen Davies, Unison's national officer for social services, described care trusts as a "mechanism to place social services under NHS control" and he congratulated branches for campaigning effectively against them.

Delegates also voted unanimously in favour of a motion highlighting the crisis in social care and urging ministers to ensure that funding for social services is increased at a rate that protects and improves services while ensuring staff can be paid a decent wage.

Members also resolved to conduct research into the high turnover of social care staff and to oppose staff being used as "scapegoats".

Davies said that Unison welcomed the spending increase announced in April but added that it was "a disgrace" that ministers had suggested the extra money should not go into improving staff salaries.

"If the money is not going to be devoted to more and better paid staff then we fear that it will go to boosting the profits of those private sector providers who are increasingly promoted by ministers and their joint review teams as the solution to every problem," he said.

Standards in social care needed to be raised, and better funding was not an end in itself, he added. "We need the cash to do a better job for service users, but we utterly reject the league table mentality that ministers have imported from education into social care. Name and shame has no place in social services."