Living Wage

David Lammy Excerpts

Thursday 6th November 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Warwick and Leamington (Chris White) on securing this very good debate. There will be Members of the House who, like me, grew up in a home in low pay, by which I mean that there were moments when we did not have 50p for the meter—utilities in homes like ours were metered back in the ’70s and ’80s—so the electricity went off and we lit a candle. It was not always clear that the fridge would be full. I remember at age 12, when my father left our home, focusing on my mother’s salary, which was just above £12,000 at the time, and realising that it would be a struggle to survive on that amount. That was in the mid-1980s, and here we are in 2014.

We are talking about the prospect of a good life, not being wealthy or having lots of money, and about people doing typical jobs, so not just cleaners and security guards, but secretaries and people working in shops. Those are the kinds of jobs for which the call for a living wage has become hugely important and desperately needed in our country. I remember when the cleaners who worked in my local college came to see me. They were women who looked like my mother, and they were pleading with me to help them retain their jobs because the college had said that in order to increase their pay to the living wage, which was their demand, it would have to cut their hours to such an extent that they would be working only 32 weeks a year. Those women did not know how they would survive. Because of the fight along with the GMB union, we got them the living wage.

I also think of the paradox in my constituency of a premiership football club that spent £103 million on new players after Gareth Bale left last summer but still cannot manage to pay its bar staff, caterers, security guards and cleaners the living wage. I do not want to single out my local club, because that is true of the entire premiership, in which we see millions of pounds spent week after week, and in which some players can earn as much in two hours as someone on the living wage earns in a whole year. That is the country in which we are living in 2014. Frankly, it shames our nation that we are having this debate so long after the birth of the welfare state.

In these times we must recognise—Opposition Members, too, must recognise this—that it cannot be right that in our last year in office we were spending £21.5 billion on housing benefit. Why should British taxpayers top up the incomes of people living in homes when surely it is British employers who should be paying that sum? This is a profound debate that has begun in relation to a living wage, but it also cuts to much bigger questions about the kind of society we live in, and the kind of society that we must surely become, in this first part of the 21st century.

Linked to that is the reason why there are people in Britain who increasingly want to travel off to fringe political interests, because when politicians use phrases such as “affordable housing”, they do not see housing that is in any sense affordable. In Kingston and Richmond, here in London, rents have gone up 40% in two years. In my borough of Haringey they have gone up by 20% in two years. The idea that £1,400 a month is affordable is a joke to most families in this city. It takes the lion’s share of the little money that they have. Of course, it is spent in another way, because these parents, as my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey) highlighted, are unable to spend time with their children. As a consequence, many children are raising themselves in their homes, with all the disastrous outcomes that can meet them along the way. Paying the living wage is therefore essential.

This also speaks to the nature of our economy. Here in London, 88% of the economy is in the service sector. The phrase, “the service sector”, sounds kind of nice when we say it, but when we peel it back we see that a smaller and smaller proportion is in the public sector. It is shrinking because of cuts to local government and the health service—the public services that we all recognise. The lion’s share of the service sector is retail. Lots of folk are trapped in jobs that not only do not pay well but do not allow them to be clear about their journey to a job that can pay well. I grew up in a house where my mother made that journey—her salary went from up £12,000 to the £20,000s over a 15-year period. I am very grateful to Unison for helping her with the early Unionlearn schemes and to the shop stewards who pushed her by saying “Rose, you can do better by these kids—you can move on.” I remember the City and Guilds certificate on our wall. Indeed, I have still got it somewhere in the loft; I will have to dig it out after this debate.

Skills are essential. Yet when we look across the country at further education and listen to debates on it in this House, it is predominantly about young people. Where are the night schools? Where are the FE colleges that are open at 10, 11 or 12 o’clock at night when ordinary working people can skill up in that way? Is it simply that these jobs have left our economy because that is the nature of the hourglass economy? Yes, we call for a living wage because it is essential, but we must also ask profound questions about why our economy seems to be leaving so many people in work but in poverty.

London has the biggest inequality of all the regions of the country. This city has 640,000 families on low pay. That is a major challenge to its future prospects that we will surely need to do something about over the coming years, and we can do it only if we ask challenging questions about the economy. Over the coming months and years, we must push employers hard and firmly to meet their obligations on a living wage. We must see many, many more join this fight.

I applaud Citizens UK for all its work. I applaud the unions, the Churches and the faith communities for pushing and pressing for more. However, we in this House will have to heed what the public are telling us if we do not want to see fringe parties occupying this debate with a very simple message: “Blame it on the immigrants; we’ll solve the problem by pulling out of Europe.” I wish it really were that simple. The problems are deep and profound, and we must meet this need as quickly as possible.