Living Standards

Jonathan Edwards Excerpts

Wednesday 4th September 2013 Commons Chamber

[Rachel Reeves]

I will not give way to Members who have already intervened, but I will give way to those who have not yet made an intervention.

That will be the difference between us at the next election. We have a Tory party that is out of touch with the challenges facing families and that believes in the outdated orthodoxy that if the rich get richer, the wealth will trickle down; a Tory party that will not stand up to vested interests or stand up for British families; a Tory party that has overseen three years of falling wages; and a Tory party that offered warm words about the living wage at the time of the election, followed by a surge in the number of people working for less than the living wage over the past three years.

Meanwhile, one nation Labour, even in opposition, has driven forward this campaign. Labour councils are paying the living wage to their staff and extending it through procurement chains. Fifteen Labour local authorities are now accredited living wage employers, with another 80 in the pipeline. Labour is committed to doing all it can in government to support the spread of the living wage, and is now working with Alan Buckle, deputy chairman of KPMG International, to look how this can best be done.

All the examples that I am sure we will hear in this debate about the rising numbers of food banks, payday loans, part-time jobs and zero-hours contracts make it all the more galling for the Chancellor to have claimed earlier this summer that wages were rising.

[Jonathan Edwards (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr) (PC)]

The hon. Lady is making a very powerful speech, to be fair, and she has made some important points about zero-hours contracts. Is she aware that Rhondda council is implementing zero-hours contracts for some of its workers, and it is a Labour-run council? Will she join me in condemning its actions?

[Rachel Reeves]

Zero-hours contracts can work for some people, but their growth has led to far too many people not having the flexibility they need. No one has said that zero-hours contracts should be banned, but the exploitation of far too many workers is resulting in all the power shifting to employers and not to employees.

The most recent figures show that real household disposable income fell by 1.7% in the latest quarter—the biggest fall for 26 years. The Chancellor claimed that living standards were improving and that incomes were rising. We all know why he made that desperate claim. [Interruption.] The Secretary of State for Education says that disposable incomes are rising, but the figures show that they fell by 1.7% in the latest quarter—the biggest fall for 26 years. People will find it very surprising that he claims that living standards are improving when for so many families across the country exactly the reverse is happening. We all know that Lynton Crosby, the head of Conservative electoral strategy, a job he shares with the part-time Chancellor, has told the Prime Minister—just one of the things he has been telling him—that he should be relentlessly focusing on living standards. Yet, as the Secretary of State for Education has shown, the Government are out of touch on living standards, leaving ordinary families out of pocket. It is one rule for millionaires, another for our ordinary workers; one rule for train companies, another for the hard-up commuter; and one rule for the energy companies, another for people getting higher bills through their letterboxes. Rents are up, house building is down. We have the worst Prime Minister on living standards since records began. The Prime Minister is out of touch, and hard-working families are out of pocket.