Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many contracts procured by her Department and its arms-length bodies require that the contractor pays those of its employees undertaking the work contracted for the real living wage as defined by the Living Wage Foundation in each of the last three financial years.

Home Office requires all of its suppliers to comply with the legal minimum standards of pay as set out in the Government’s National Living Wage legislation. This is a contractual obligation on the supplier and is monitored through contract compliance mechanisms. We do not require or stipulate in our contractual arrangements a requirement to meet the Living Wage Foundation’s real living wage.

The Government believes that people have the right to a higher wage and not to be punished by higher taxes. As part of this, from April 2016, we introduced a new mandatory National Living Wage (NLW) for workers aged 25 and above, and this will rise to £7.50 an hour in April 2017. We insist that employers pay at least the National Minimum Wage.