National Minimum Wage (Amendment) Regulations 2021

Baroness Blower Excerpts

Monday 1st March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Blower (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I welcome the opportunity to speak on this issue, which is of huge concern to the 2 million or so workers paid at or— shamefully and illegally—below the minimum wage. These are workers in sectors such as retail, cleaning, maintenance, social care and hospitality. A rise of 2.2% may not, at first glance, appear too bad at this time, but 2.2% of not very much is very little. At the rate for those aged over 25, which is due to become the rate for those aged over 23, 2.2% amounts, as the Minister said, to just 19 pence per hour. Small wonder, then, that 3,000 care workers in Hillingdon, in the constituency of the Prime Minister, cannot afford £112 a week—what Loughborough University assesses is necessary to feed a family of four—even with two adults in a four-person household working at that level. I am really not sure how the Minister thinks that is a fair reward, as my noble friend Lady Chakrabarti said earlier. The level of the minimum wage is simply too low, and appallingly so in the fifth—or is it the sixth?—richest country globally.

The national minimum wage is not a minimum wage; it is simply an hourly rate, and one that is all too low at that. Even with a much more significant and, in my view, highly justified, increase, the situation for a worker on a zero-hours contract, with no guarantees of how many hours will be available shift to shift, let alone week to week, is not an acceptable state of affairs. It provides no income security at all. For the minimum wage to be an acceptable arrangement, the level should be increased significantly beyond what is envisaged today. But that increase should be part of a collectively bargained contract that encompasses pay and conditions, including hours to be worked and wages to be paid at a level that affords income security and a life free from the fear of the next bill arriving.

In short, fairness and social justice, as well as the Government’s much-vaunted levelling up agenda for all workers, requires the introduction of wages determined through sectoral collective bargaining, not the imposition of poverty pay levels. To quote the OECD:

“Collective bargaining and workers' voice are key labour rights, as well as potentially strong enablers of inclusive labour market.”


Surely that is advice to be heeded.