Jobs and Work

Paul Blomfield Excerpts

Wednesday 11th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)]

During the past year, I have been pleased to work with colleagues from both sides of the House in seeking, with some success, to regulate payday lenders. Going beyond such regulation, however, we need to ask why people turn to high-cost credit and what we can do about it.

Christians Against Poverty has recently reported that 80% of its advice service users have taken out loans for food, 52% for fuel bills and 36% for rent and mortgage payments: food, heating and housing—the cost of living. There are two sides to the problems in that not only are costs rising, but incomes are depressed. My right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition was right to say last week:

“It is a basic belief of the British people that if you work all the hours God sends, you should at least be able to make ends meet.”—[Official Report, 4 June 2014; Vol. 582, c. 16.]

That is not happening today in Britain, one of the richest countries in the world.

Some 47% of those who visited Citizens Advice with a payday loan issue in the past quarter are in work. There has been a staggering 60% increase in the number of working people claiming housing benefit since the Government were elected. According to a recent Church Action on Poverty report, much of the increased use of food banks has been by working people on low wages. Our economy is simply not rewarding hard work.

Over the last generation, there has been a shift of between 5% and 7% of GDP from wages to profits and from profits to shareholders—quite deliberately—by weakening the bargaining power of working people. We are now seeing the consequences: for too many people, part-time employment has replaced full-time work; the minimum wage has become the norm, not a safety net; and the security of income that people look for has been replaced by the uncertainty of zero-hours contracts.

Employers are looking for every opportunity to drive down labour costs. A care worker who came to see me was paid the minimum wage for the time she spent with the elderly, but was paid nothing as she spent hours driving from one appointment to another. People have come to see me about zero-hours contracts that make it impossible for them to plan their family budget from week to week.

Growing impoverishment is not the only consequence. Public funds are increasingly being used to prop up a low-wage economy. Social security spend on in-work benefits has risen by almost 20% in 10 years. Taxpayers’ money is being diverted from funding public services to paying dividends and feeding the growing income inequality.

People deserve better. They need a Queen’s Speech that stimulates the growth that will create better-paid jobs through an active industrial strategy, backed by a British investment bank and regional banks, and by building the homes that we need. We need to make work pay by strengthening the enforcement of the national minimum wage and giving local councils the responsibility of taking on that task. We need action to end abuses such as the non-payment of travel time, which affects about 10% of care workers, according to the Low Pay Commission. We need to end bogus self-employment in sectors such as construction. We need to reset the remit of the Low Pay Commission to increase the national minimum wage significantly and bring it closer to average earnings. We need to stop wage rates being undercut by employers who recruit exclusively from eastern Europe. We need to end the abuse of zero-hours contracts by giving workers the right to proper contracts that reflect their actual working hours. We need to work towards a living wage by building on the initiatives of the Labour councils that have implemented it for their workers, using the levers of public procurement to encourage more employers to pay it, and putting in place tax breaks to encourage more employers to adopt it.

I started my comments by welcoming the action that the House has taken on payday lending, but let us not just deal with the symptoms; let us tackle the sickness at its source. We need bold action to make our economy work for the many, not for the few. The Gracious Speech falls short of that mark.