Public Sector Pay

Ben Lake Excerpts

Monday 4th December 2017 Westminster Hall

[David Linden (Glasgow East) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hanson. I thank the 331 people in my constituency who signed the petition, and I commend the hon. Member for Warrington North (Helen Jones) on very eloquently opening the debate. I am grateful to the hundreds of local people who have emailed and written to me before the debate and I am pleased to be speaking on their behalf in calling for action on public sector pay.

It is important that, as we take part in this debate, we remember the backdrop against which it is taking place. We have the worst wage growth in 210 years, and public sector workers have seen their spending power reduced because of rising inflation. The average household has lost £7.74 per week due to higher prices of essential shopping items such as bread, milk and cheese. The Governor of the Bank of England has warned that households have slashed spending as incomes continue to be squeezed by a weak pound, which is almost certainly not helped by the Brexit shambles that is unfolding. We are witnessing the longest fall in living standards since records began. Under this Government, whose Members have been very silent in this debate, inequality has been exacerbated and, in the words of the Resolution Foundation, we are witnessing

“the biggest increase in inequality since Thatcher.”

This morning, I attended the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s launch in central London of its report on the state of UK poverty in 2017. The report states that one in eight workers now lives in poverty. Essentially, that blows a hole in the argument that work is the best route out of poverty, especially if we are condoning embarrassing levels of poverty pay. The report said that 47% of working-age adults and the poorest fifth of the population now spend one third of their income purely on housing costs. The recent Budget was a missed opportunity for the Chancellor to end pay restraint for our hard-working public sector workers. The Chancellor should have followed the commitment of the Scottish Government, which will lay out its draft Budget next month. Our finance secretary Derek Mackay has already said that the Scottish Government will lift the public sector pay cap, even if Westminster—

[Ben Lake (Ceredigion) (PC)]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman that public sector workers across the UK deserve better than the current policy pursued by the UK Government. However, does he agree that in the interim, devolved Governments have a responsibility to do all that they can to mitigate the worst effects of the public sector pay cap, and to ensure that our public sector workers get a fair deal, regardless of where they are in the UK?

[David Linden]

I wholeheartedly agree with the hon. Gentleman. I very much welcome the engagement between the Scottish Government in Edinburgh and our trade unions on the public sector pay cap.

During the September recess, I undertook something that may be a bit unusual for an MP, called In Your Shoes, where I spent a day every week doing a different job: a day pulling pints and calling the bingo at the Tavern bar in Parkhead, a day with the Easterhouse citizens advice bureau, a day teaching children at Our Lady of Peace Primary School, and a day out with police officers in Baillieston. One of the last days that I did was at Easterhouse fire station. Over the course of the day, the guys at Easterhouse fire station were incredibly welcoming; they had me dressed up in all the outfits, going on the drills with them and using the ladders and hoses. After that, we went back to the fire station. I was grateful to the officers at Easterhouse fire station and the Fire Brigades Union representative, Thomas Hanlon, for their thoughts and comments on the challenges that they face. I was struck by the bravery of those guys, because when a building is on fire, they run towards it, as we saw happen at Grenfell tower. We MPs are on £76,000 a year, and the reality is that none of us would run into a burning building, but that is the reality of what those guys do. The Government will say that we are all in this together, but the reality is that we are not. We are not running into the burning buildings with those firefighters. The least that the Government can do is give them the pay rise that they deserve. Anything else is just lip service.