Minimum wage should be strengthened by Tories, says minister
I remember in 1996 my much lamented and one in a million former friend Patrick and I taking the low pay commission around southern Lincolnshire. In the evening gloom we looked across the fields at a Breugel like scene of workers in the fields picking brassicas. Soon after the new Labour Government introduced the minimum wage and 1 in 6 Lincolnshire workers got a pay rise. For those of us sick of the endless concentration on the “unworthy poor” in the current benefit debate, this article about enforcing the minimum wage as a means of making work pay and giving local authorities a key role in that process is very refreshing. Looking more positively at a fair days pay for a fair days work this article tells us:
An influential Conservative minister, Matthew Hancock, has said the Tories should “not only support the minimum wage, but strengthen it” and that he was interested in ideas such as councils being given powers to help enforce the measure.
Enforcement currently lies exclusively with HM Revenue & Customs, and there have been very few cases of court enforcement under the coalition or Labour governments.
There has been a recent pick-up in penalties but some councils, such as Newham in east London, have been pressing to be given formal powers to enforce the minimum wage, just as they can enforce health and safety standards on small firms.
Hancock, the skills minister and a former aide to George Osborne, said his party needed to be seen to be tackling the causes not just of excessively high pay, but also unjustified low pay. Speaking at a Resolution Foundation meeting in London, he said: “Not only are the centre right best placed to tackle low pay, but we need to shout it from the rooftops.”
He said it was an essential supply-side reform since it helped people currently on benefit into work by giving them an incentive to work. “The standard argument against the minimum wage is that a minimum wage would price people out of jobs. But the academic analysis doesn’t back it up. The analysis of the impact of minimum wages is one of the most studied areas of economics,” he said.