Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Jessica Morden and Margot James

Tuesday 12th September 2017 Commons Chamber

[Margot James]

Productivity is a crucial part of our industrial strategy, as are good employee communications and practice. The union between Matthew Taylor’s report and the industrial strategy will focus very much on improving productivity as the basis of improving people’s earning power.

[Jessica Morden (Newport East) (Lab)]

3. To ask the Secretary of State what steps he is taking to increase average weekly earnings.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Margot James)]

We need an economy that works for everyone. We are developing the industrial strategy to improve living standards and boost earning power, so that everyone in our country can share the benefits of our economic success.

[Jessica Morden]

With average weekly real earnings lower than they were in 2007 and with the Institute for Fiscal Studies saying that the flatlining of real wages is unprecedented since at least the end of the second world war, does the Minister accept that Britain needs a pay rise? What are Ministers doing to tackle this?

[Margot James]

That is one of the reasons why the Government have introduced the national living wage, as a means of boosting the earning power of people at the lower end of the pay scale. I acknowledge that average earnings have been static over the past year, but it is important to recognise that people on the national minimum wage were given a 4% pay rise in April this year, and 1.3 million of those people have been taken out of paying income tax altogether.