Age Discrimination: National Living Wage
Debate between Nick Boles and Cat Smith(7 years, 11 months ago)
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The Minister for Skills (Nick Boles)
Mr Davies, it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. Whatever utterances you choose to make, I will still enjoy serving under your chairmanship.
I congratulate the hon. Member for Halifax (Holly Lynch) on securing the debate and for setting out her argument as clearly as she did. Hers was one of the more reasonable and well-founded arguments made, but listening even to her speech one would have thought it was not the Labour Government who introduced the idea of age-related minimum wages. Because you are, Mr Davies, like me, of a somewhat older generation than some of the contributors to the debate, you will remember that age-related rates were an integral part of the original National Minimum Wage Act 1998—Labour are right to be proud of that achievement. It was integral that the design should allow rates to vary up to the age of 26. That was done by the Labour Government explicitly to protect young workers in the labour market.
In advancing the argument that the national living wage is somehow an egregious act of discrimination, the Labour party and the hon. Member for Halifax have to accept that they are advancing the argument that the last Labour Government to win an election were a discriminatory Government. Although I am sure that the hon. Members from the Scottish National party would be only too happy to endorse that suggestion, I suspect that the hon. Member for Halifax and the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Cat Smith), would not want to go quite that far.
Let me turn to the impact on employment opportunities. Hon. Members seem to forget that there is a real reason why raising legal minimum wages for younger workers too quickly is a risk. When the last Labour Government—the same Labour Government who brought in the minimum wage with age-related bands—finally limped out of office in 2010, unemployment was high in general, but it was particularly high for young people. In the first quarter of 2010, more than 930,000 young people throughout the United Kingdom aged between 16 and 24 were unemployed. The unemployment rate was much higher as a percentage than the rate for people over 24.
I am glad to say that under the coalition Government and the current Government, we have managed to bring unemployment down not only for people over 24, but particularly for people under 24. Now, 307,000 fewer people between the ages of 16 and 24 are unemployed than when the last Labour Government completed their term in office. The risk of unemployment for young people is a sensitive issue because we all know that a protracted period of unemployment can have long-term negative effects on people’s chances as they go through life.
Nick Boles
No. I heard a lot from the hon. Lady.
It is especially important that young people are given early opportunities, which explains the original construction of the national minimum wage. Opposition Members surely recognise that the Low Pay Commission is an independent body charged with advising the Government on what is a responsible increase for the national minimum wage. The commission is charged with looking in particular at what is called—forgive me for the rather unpleasant jargon—the varying bites of minimum wage rises. That refers to the percentage of the median wage for someone of that age that the national minimum wage would represent at that particular level. I am sure everybody can understand, because it is a matter of common sense, that the closer the national minimum wage rate for somebody of that age gets to the median wage, the greater the risk that raising the national minimum wage rate will reduce employment opportunities.
Women and Low Pay
Debate between Nick Boles and Cat Smith(8 years, 5 months ago)
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Nick Boles
As the hon. Lady is aware, all decisions, legislation and regulations are subject to equality impact assessments, in which all those things are considered. Her intervention leads me neatly to my conclusion. For all that the steps that I described—transparency, leadership, childcare provision and increasing the national minimum wage through the introduction of the national living wage—are powerful, the most important source of opportunity to improve the pay of women and close the pay gap is a strong economy that creates lots of new jobs. Those new jobs and employment opportunities give women the opportunity to go out and command better wages.
Although I understand that the hon. Lady opposes public spending cuts, it is nevertheless the case that as a result of the consistent policy of slow but steady deficit reduction, this economy has created more jobs than any other country in Europe, and more women are in work than ever before. It might have been possible for Opposition Members, while properly opposing the Government on specifics, to give some acknowledgement of the fundamental achievement of creating jobs, which create opportunities, including the opportunity for women to improve the wages that they earn.