Fairness and Inequality

Stewart Hosie Excerpts

Tuesday 11th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr MacNeil]

I thought the hon. Gentleman was going to stand at the Dispatch Box to tell us what Johann Lamont is thinking about the cuts commission, but he failed to do that.

[Stewart Hosie (Dundee East) (SNP)]

There is a lot of deflection going on. The Labour party has said that nothing is off the table, which might mean £9,000 per child per year to go to university, a return to a tax on ill health with charge-free prescriptions going and all that. In his heart, does my hon. Friend not agree that this is ideological: the British Labour party thinks that we are part of a something-for-nothing society, when all we are doing is caring for those most in need?

[Mr MacNeil]

My hon. Friend puts it very well: we are caring for those in need. Our hearts should go out to those needing help, and we should not be thought of as part of a something-for-nothing society.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr MacNeil]

Had the hon. Lady been in Parliament when Labour were in power and seen what her party did in that period, she might be less bold. We have to look at what is good for Scotland and what we can do to create opportunity and employment in Scotland, and I will not resile or shy away from that in any way, shape or form.

The contention is that money is not circulating. That is why some years ago we had a fiscal stimulus and why we have had quantitative easing. My problem with QE is that it has not been aimed at the demand recovery for which Stiglitz and Krugman would look; instead, in the opinion of many, it is propping up financial institutions. I note that, at one time, Ben Bernanke suggested that the way to return demand to Japan 20 years ago, when the country was experiencing stagflation, was to take a helicopter full of yen notes and fly above Japanese cities shovelling them out. That is certainly one way to return demand to the economy, but of course serious voices would recoil at the idea and not allow it to happen. There are some answers in economics, however, that are counter-intuitive to many of the things we naturally feel and do daily. We should not be afraid of looking at some of the other, more grounded, ideas, but I fear that a Government who have chosen the cult of austerity over the pursuit of growth are unlikely to look imaginatively at what they can do for the economy—they certainly have not done so in the past three years.

Growth in productivity has not been matched by growth in wages. The “Working for Poverty” report notes that

“Wages and economic output began to decouple in 2003, five years before the onset of the financial crisis. Real average wages have grown by 13% since 1999, whereas economic output”—

that is, productivity—

“has risen by four times this rate.”

That means again that economic growth alone will not solve Britain’s low pay crisis. The Government should set up a commission of inquiry into poverty and inequality, as we call for in the motion, to look at how we can improve the lives of citizens—people we see daily; people we perhaps knew in school, or relatives; people who live in our communities. They should not be left behind, with only 18% escaping low pay over a decade, as we heard earlier. In a further example, the report notes that

“Productivity growth and median pay began to decouple in the 1980s and median hourly earnings have failed to keep pace with the average value of output that workers produce.”

I am heartened to know that even the Prime Minister supports the living wage, saying that where companies can afford to pay the living wage, they should. A living wage is only £7.65 an hour—that is the figure mentioned in the White Paper for independence and in the “Working for Poverty” report. That is only £306 for a 40-hour week or about £16,000 per annum—not a king’s ransom by any means. We should remember that the minimum wage is £6.31 an hour, so it takes an increase of only £1.34 an hour to get to the living wage. I praise the Prime Minister for what he said, but while he apparently sees the justice and wisdom of the measure, as a politician in charge of a Government, he is doing nothing about it. We should realise that life is short, life in politics is shorter, and life in power is shortest of all, so Governments should take the opportunity when they have power to do a lot to improve the lives of the people they govern.

Some of this debate is mere dry statistics. We should look at some of the human stories in the “Working for Poverty” report—the accounts of normal, decent people across the countries who are trying to earn an honest living in a state, the UK, that does not value all its citizens fairly. Their stories should be heard and understood; they inform the debate and help to remove the dryness of the statistics.

[Stewart Hosie]

Very generously indeed, my hon. Friend has praised the Prime Minister, who at least wants to do something about the minimum wage, but is it not disappointing when the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire (Jo Swinson) was answering questions about the living wage, she said, even though it is £7.65 in Scotland and £8.80 in London, that it was “too difficult to calculate”? Is not that a rather bizarre position for the UK Government to take, given that we already know what the figures are?

[Mr MacNeil]

My hon. Friend puts it very well indeed. I do not think any more needs to be said.

Case study 1 in the interim report from the Living Wage Commission is Paul’s story. The report tells us that

“Paul is a support worker in the care sector in the North West of England. His partner is a youth worker in the youth justice sector for the local Borough Council. They have a sixteen year old daughter and are both paid below the Living Wage.”

Paul says:

“I started work for my current employer in 2009 and have never been given a pay rise. During this time I have experienced a palpable leap in the cost of living. My wife started her employment in 2010 and she has witnessed a drop in the amount of money she is paid for her considerable and anti-social working hours.

We are both working full-time, living in local housing association rented accommodation and we are always struggling to pay our way. We have no luxuries, we have not been on holiday and we do not socialise. We work, eat and sleep. There are no extra benefits we can claim to help us. There is little we can hope to do but keep on working in the hope that we will eventually see some ‘light at the end of the tunnel’.

I have juggled our debt as best as I am able to. I have moved some debt onto zero interest credit cards which have given us an 18 month window to clear some debt without accruing the hefty interest charges which would be crippling.

We are substantially in arrears with the rental of our home. The landlord is attempting to negotiate a payment plan to help us to manage this debt. We avoid doing so to enable us to more flexibly manage our debt. One week we can pay a little off our rental debt but the next we must buy food and fuel, pay outstanding vets bills, and more besides.

We often spend days apart. This is due to my low pay and the need for me to do sleep-in duties as a carer to garner something like a liveable income. We can often only communicate through rushed text messages and leaving voicemails for each other. Our sixteen year old daughter misses us both greatly. We did not even have a day out together as a family in 2013.”

That one story crystallises in many ways the nub of today’s debate. I am grateful to the Archbishop of York for his report and for setting out people’s experiences. Perhaps the saddest line in that quotation is:

“We work, eat and sleep”.

It is shocking that the citizens of a first-world, G7 country are living in that way.

Government Members often talk about the importance of family as a building block of society. I would argue that the living wage benefits and reinforces families. To take home the same wage that an employee on the living wage would receive for a typical 37.5 hour week, minimum wage earners would have to work 52.3 hours a week in London or 45.5 hours a week outside London. In a typical Monday-to-Friday working week, that is equivalent to working 10.5 hours a day in London or 9.1 hours a day outside London. That rises to 11.5 hours for London or 10.1 hours outside London if we include an hour’s lunch break.

A worker who does a Monday-to-Friday job in London on the national minimum wage, who gets the Government’s recommended amount of sleep each night and who has an average commute therefore gets only three hours and 45 minutes to spend as they wish in each week day. The same employee would get six hours and 45 minutes of time each day if they were paid the living wage. That is an extra three hours a day or almost double the time that a minimum wage worker has to spend with their family or to do anything else that they want to do. That shows how those in low-paid jobs have little work-life balance and have to sacrifice the time that they spend with their children or on social engagement. That can lead to other problems further down the line. If ever there was an example of what an additional £1.43 an hour could bring, that is it.

When we hear people using the family as a political argument in future, it must be backed up by some economic and legislative muscle in order that people have a decent wage and a decent start in life. The most important point to make is that the people we are discussing are working—they are the working poor. They work long hours to do what they can for themselves and their families, yet they are unable to participate properly in society.

It is a damning indictment of all of us in this House that we have tolerated the emergence of such a reality in our midst over the past few decades. Although I am only 43, all of us have a responsibility for that. We have a responsibility to speak out about it. That is why we are having this debate. I hope that the Government will listen and will bring forward a commission of inquiry on inequality and poverty, because those issues blight the lives of far too many people. It should simply be stopped.