Draft National Minimum Wage (Amendment) Regulations 2023

Patrick Grady Excerpts

Monday 6th March 2023 General Committees

[Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. As the hon. Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston said, nobody is going to object to any kind of rise in the minimum wage, especially in these difficult times and given the inflationary pressures being experienced across the economy, which I hope the hon. Member for Basildon and Billericay will recognise are at least in part the result of the extreme hard Brexit forced on this country by the Conservative party, with the acquiescence of the Labour party. He might be right that unemployment is low, but I can show him businesses across the country and in my constituency that are crying out for labour—for staff—because of the labour shortages that have happened as a result of that hard Brexit.

[Mr Baron]

I say this in the spirit in which the hon. Gentleman made his point: he needs to see the bigger picture. It is quite interesting that there is almost a balance between the number of job vacancies and the number of people who are unemployed. That actually suggests that the economy is doing quite well. There may be a mismatch for whatever reason, but those vacancies are there; we just need to ensure that we encourage people into work more.

[Patrick Grady]

Indeed. There are plenty of asylum seekers in my constituency who have a huge amount of skills and talent but are unable to deploy them, because this Government will not give them the right to work, earn a fair wage and pay tax back into the system. Perhaps that is a place where we could start or, if the Government want to make working more attractive, perhaps—getting to the heart of the debate—people should be paid a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work.

[Andy McDonald]

We have heard about litmus tests, one of which is the rate of unemployment. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that one litmus test is whether workers have enough money to live on and to pay their bills?

[Patrick Grady]

Yes, precisely. That is why the rises today are welcome, but they are not necessarily sufficient for a lot of people.

The way in which the Government have co-opted the use of the term “living wage” to describe their statutory minimum wage is unfortunate. It causes a lot of confusion, and is particularly unfair to people looking for a real living wage, which the Living Wage Foundation has calculated since long before this Government adopted that language and it consistently comes up with higher rates; its proposals for the coming financial year are £10.90 an hour for the UK as a whole and £11.95 in London. The £10.90 compared to the £10.42 might not, on paper, sound like a huge difference but in reality, in a seven-hour day, that is about £3.36 extra a day or, over a five-day week, £16.80 a week. That starts to make a significant impact on the pound in people’s pockets.

Of course, that is only the upper rate for workers aged over 23. We agree entirely with the arguments being made for the extension of a real living wage to everyone in employment without distinction for their age. As other Members have said, people do not pay differential prices when they go to the supermarket or use consumer goods or utilities and so on. People should be paid the same for the same kind of work.

The Government could be doing more, and they could learn from the Scottish Government in that regard. The Scottish business pledge, introduced by the Scottish Government, encourages employers to pay the real living wage, to end zero-hours contracts and to take action in their businesses to close the gender pay gap. The Scottish Government also offer a wider social contract to workers, including free prescriptions, tuition fees for their children going to university, the Scottish child payment—which is a real game-changer—the baby box and all the other actions that show just how much we have been able to do with the powers of devolution, and point to what we could achieve when Scotland becomes independent.

As welcome as the rise today might be, it does not go far enough. I do not think anyone in Scotland will look very much at what is on offer from the Conservatives or, indeed, the Labour party and think that this is as good as it gets.