My bill to make work pay in Low Wage Britain

Today I will be speaking in Parliament on behalf of a woman called Catherine. She lives nearly 200 miles away, far from the Westminster bubble, and she doesn’t have time to take notice of polls or political pundits. But what happens in our politics and the type of government we choose in six months’ time will shape her life more than most.

When my name was drawn out of a hat earlier this year, giving me the chance to introduce a Private Members Bill on any subject I wanted, it was Catherine’s story that made up my mind. Catherine is a cleaner and housekeeper in my constituency.She juggles six jobs in six different locations across Barnsley, working more than 50 hours a week on the minimum wage.

Like many people across Britain, Catherine struggles to make ends meet. With the real terms value of the minimum wage down since 2010, her pay packet doesn’t stretch as far as it used to.

When I asked her how this affected her, she said she’d had to cut down on what she described as ‘luxuries.’ I soon realised she meant she couldn’t afford essentials like new clothes.“I just work to exist,” she said. “I can’t afford nice stuff. I just work to keep my head above water.”

It’s easy to take for granted now that Catherine earns a National Minimum Wage at all.

Before 1997, many workers like her were expected to work for as little as £1 or £2 an hour. There were appalling cases of factory employees earning only £1.22 an hour, care home workers taking home just £1.66 an hour and even a chip shop worker from Birmingham forced to make do with 80p an hour.It took a Labour Government to end this scandal. A generation later, the low pay challenge has changed.

The National Minimum Wage helped root out exploitation and extreme examples of poverty pay. Now we have huge numbers of people across our country that do a hard day’s work but are still living on the breadline.

Catherine is just one of more than 5 million people across Britain stuck on low pay – an all-time record.Women and young people are being hit the hardest. Nearly a third of all working women and two fifths of 16 to 30 year old do not earn a decent wage.

This goes to the heart of the reality of the economic recovery that George Osborne is presiding over. Job creation in the lowest paid sectors has exploded at double the rate of the rest of the economy since 2010. Nearly two-thirds of children living in poverty now live in families with someone in work.

Our strategy needs to evolve to fit the changing nature of the task before us.Professor Sir George Bain, the architect of the minimum wage as the first chairman of the Low Pay Commission, has called for a fresh approach. Several business leaders have also said the minimum wage needs to rise faster than it has in the past.

My #MakeWorkPay Bill would put this into action, preserving what has made the Low Pay Commission such a success, and building on it to meet the low pay challenges of the future.It would require the Government to set an ambitious target to increase the minimum wage over five years.A clear long-term target will give businesses time to plan and adapt their business models to boost productivity to support higher wages.

We know from international evidence that countries can support higher minimum wages with no adverse impact on jobs. The UK experience also shows that the economy can support more ambitious increases than we have seen in recent years. The minimum wage rose by more than 6 per cent a year on average during its first five years, defying critics (several of whom are now sitting around the Cabinet table) who claimed that it would lead to a loss of jobs.

My Bill would also address areas of our economy where there are particular problems of low pay, giving the Low Pay Commission new powers to tackle the causes and consequences of low pay in different sectors.

The realities of parliamentary procedure mean that the odds may be stacked against my Bill today. But if elected next year, a Labour Government will set a national goal to halve the number of people on low pay in our country. Under our proposals the minimum wage would rise to at least £8 by 2020.

We will offer firms temporary tax incentives to encourage more of them to pay a Living Wage.

And we will make a huge difference to the lives of working people like Catherine.

When I asked her what difference a higher wage would make to her life, she couldn’t quite imagine it. “I could cut down my hours, couldn’t I?” she said. “I would have some time to do other things?”

That’s the important difference – for Catherine and for millions of working people – that I’ll be arguing for today.

Dan Jarvis is the Labour MP for Barnsley Central