Age Discrimination: National Living Wage

Liz McInnes Excerpts

Wednesday 8th June 2016 Westminster Hall

[Liz McInnes (Heywood and Middleton) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure, as always, to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies. I have only prepared a short speech, so I might give the Front-Bench spokespersons a bit longer to speak. However, I am sure that we are all eager to hear what the Minister has to say.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Halifax (Holly Lynch) for securing this important debate. It is about a subject that I know she has done a lot of work on, and I commend her for that. This is a really important issue and I agree with her that fair pay for fair work should start at the age of 18. The arbitrary cut-off point of 25 makes no sense; 25 is not the age of consent. There is no reason why this Government should have picked on people under 25. Not for the first time, I find myself standing up in this place and asking, “What have this Government got against young people?”

This Government seem to be intent on attacking young people across the country by putting barriers in their way. They come in the form of educational barriers—the scrapping of the education maintenance allowance—the depletion of local youth services, the increase in tuition fees, the transformation of maintenance grants for students into maintenance loans, which puts those students into more debt, the refusal to address zero-hours contracts and the failure on housing, with the lowest house building figure since the 1920s. In all these ways, this Government discriminate against younger people and now they seem to be using pay in the workforce as another way of undermining our young people.

We welcome the Government’s national living wage, although I prefer to refer to it as the new national minimum wage. The real national living wage would be considerably higher and set independently by the University of Loughborough, which is something we should all be moving towards—a rate of pay that people can actually afford to live on and that is independently assessed. I welcome the pay rise, but I am profoundly concerned that the Government are undervaluing the skills and talents of people under 25, leaving many young people across the country in a perilous position by excluding them from the full living wage.

The legislation fails to address the finding of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission in 2015 that younger people face the

“worst economic prospects for generations”.

The commission stated:

“Younger people suffered the greatest drop in income and employment compared to older age groups and now face greater barriers to achieving economic independence and success”

than they did five years ago. The same report indicated that there was a decline in both earnings and full-time employment among younger workers, despite their being more likely to be better qualified than previous generations. We must harness and encourage the talent of young people, not discourage it.

One of the Government’s flagship polices to drive young talent was to deliver 200,000 new apprenticeships and to introduce an apprenticeship levy. However, the CBI has questioned the implementation of that policy, asking “for more clarity” and arguing that apprenticeships will only “help a small minority” of businesses. Also, apprenticeships need to be extended from traditional industrial sectors to meet the growing demands in social care, the tourism and leisure industry, and the digital and creative sectors.

Those 16 to 19-year-olds who are not in full-time education are at greater risk of being in poverty than any other category of people who are eligible to work. Even when 16 to 19-year-olds are in full employment, the cuts in benefits and the rise in zero-hours contracts have meant they face a daily struggle, making it increasingly difficult for them to get on and make a start in life by, for example, getting on to the housing ladder.

Home ownership among young people is below 50% and figures from the Office for National Statistics show that more young people aged between 20 and 34 are now living with their parents than was the case 20 years ago. The prevalence of zero-hours contracts is higher among young people than among other age groups, with 37% of those employed on zero-hours contracts aged between 16 and 24.

Austerity is a political choice and people under 25 should not pay such an unfair price—in the form of low wages and poverty—because of the policies of this Conservative Government. It is scandalous that the Government feel that they can discriminate against under-25s. Age discrimination is illegal under the Equality Act 2010 unless “objective justification” can be demonstrated, and saying that lack of experience justifies this age discrimination is not satisfactory.

In 2013, the Prime Minister proclaimed that young people have “low aspirations” and that his Government would

“get them to think that they can get all the way to the top.”

The Chancellor has claimed that the Government put “the next generation first”. The Prime Minister and the Chancellor speak great words, but they are really empty words that ring hollow, to my ears and to those of young people in this country, whose lives we are discussing today.

This Government have put young people last: last in opportunity; last in funding; last in jobs; and last in pay. We must not condemn younger people to become a lost generation and we must bring the national living wage age-exclusion to an end.