National Living Wage — House of Commons, 2016-04-18
Topic: Labor
Judith Mary Cummins (Labour, Centre-left): Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for calling me to speak in this important debate. In opening, may I place on the record my sincere thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh) for her efforts in securing this Back-Bench business debate? She is a fearless campaigner and a credit to this place. I wish her a speedy recovery, which I know she will achieve through sheer force of willpower. I also thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Enfield North (Joan Ryan) for stepping in When I sat in this Chamber alongside many other hon. Members not so many months ago and heard the Chancellor say that he was going to increase the pay of the lowest paid, I was speechless. The glib tagline was, "A pay rise for Britain". Throughout my political life, I have fought for improved pay and conditions for the working people of this country, especially the lowest paid. One of the proudest moments in my political life was seeing a Labour Government, in this very place, introduce the national minimum wage as one of their first acts—a move that was strongly opposed by the Conservatives Despite my understandable cynicism, I was delighted that the Chancellor had undergone his own damascene conversion and had finally seen the light by belatedly understanding that every worker in this great and prosperous country, not just those at the top of the ladder, deserved to be paid fairly. But—and there is always a "but" with this Government—my initial delight soon dissolved as I rapidly discovered that my cynicism was not misplaced but very much spot on. As the now former Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith), recognised, the Chancellor’s glib tagline about giving Britain a pay rise was devoid of substance and nothing more than hot air and bluff. His Budget announcement was the stuff of fairy tales. When we scratch beneath the thin veneer of the so-called national living wage, it swiftly becomes clear that the low-paid workers of this country are being hammered, just as they always are by this Tory Government Despite the Chancellor’s embarrassing U-turn on tax credits, he has ploughed ahead with cuts to the successor scheme, universal credit. Cuts introduced this very month mean that tens of thousands of low-paid working families who are in receipt of universal credit are expected to lose up to £200 a month from their pay packets. That is the first attack by this Tory Government. The second attack, and the topic of today’s debate, is the Chancellor’s spectacular failure to ensure that big business funds his so-called national living wage off its own back and through its profits, rather than off the backs of workers My hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden, the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers and the Daily Mirror newspaper, through its coverage in recent weeks, have shown that, when given the choice, big business has seized on the cheapest method to fund a pay rise for its workers by heartlessly cutting their overall pay and benefits package. That is simply shameful.