National Minimum Wage

Debate between Baroness Jowell and Baroness Primarolo

Wednesday 15th January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Dame Tessa Jowell (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)]

Having listened closely, as I always do, to the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, I am hard pressed to see how he can recommend voting against our motion, which focuses on the enforcement of the national minimum wage.

The existence of a national minimum wage is a major statement about the kind of country that we are. Beyond the clichés about hard-working families, what does hard work actually involve? Are we prepared to be citizens and representatives in a country where too many mothers ship their children from one childminder to another, often late at night and very early in the morning, because they work for employers who do not honour their statutory obligation to pay the national minimum wage? This is about decency, and if the Government are serious about the enforcement and enforceability of the national minimum wage, they must surely acknowledge that the proposals in the motion are unexceptional.

I am proud to have been part of the Government who introduced the national minimum wage, and I hope that that progressive change has now become irreversible. Over its lifetime, one of its most powerful effects has been to start to close the gender pay gap. It stood at more than 16% when the national minimum wage was introduced in 1999; its present level of 9.2% is still unacceptable. The greatest burden resulting from the lack of growth in the economy and from the Government’s tax and benefit changes has been borne by women. Women’s employment is also concentrated in poorly paid occupational groups that include care, cleaning and catering. Whatever low pay threshold is used, the proportion of working women who are low-paid is about twice that of working men on low pay.

The need for enforcement of the national minimum wage goes without saying, and the failure to enforce it is a stain on the stated ambition of the Government. I commend the next stage of the ambition, which is to move towards a living wage. I pay tribute to Citizens UK and, in particular, to London Citizens, which have been at the forefront of introducing the living wage since 2005—so much so that 214 London employers and 12 London councils have now signed up to pay it.

Many opportunities are open to the Government to urge more employers to pay the living wage: the leverage of procurement; the increased tax receipts for Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs resulting from more people being in better-paid jobs; and the practical benefits that businesses that pay the living wage report, such as more corporate resilience and social purpose, reduced absentee rates, greater loyalty and enhancement of the quality of work. Good businesses know that the living wage is good for their business; this is about the interconnection between corporate success, commercial success and social purpose.

When we talk about changes to the benefits system, we must remember that the living wage is one way in which we move families off and out of tax credits, and shift the responsibility for decent levels of pay from the state—the social security system—to employers. Having rather curtailed my remarks, I wish to finish by saying that we can follow the example of the best of business, but we should also remember what the difference means to families. The mother whose child—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

Order.