Clause 11
Employment Bill [Lords]
Mary Creagh (PPS (Rt Hon Andy Burnham, Secretary of State), Department for Culture, Media & Sport; Wakefield, Labour)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr. Caton. I congratulate the Minister on his elevation to the Privy Council.
I shall speak briefly about the new powers contained under clause 11. It is important that we empower our officials to have the full range of penalties available to them. We talked earlier about the exceptional nature of the circumstances, but in Yorkshire and Humberside—the region covered by my constituency of Wakefield—372 investigations took place last year and there were 158 non-compliant employers. That is a serious issue for my constituents in Wakefield and for the 140,000 people claiming the minimum wage throughout the area.
I will give an example of the sort of people that we are talking about. My friend Joseph Marshall told me about his son who, before the introduction of the minimum wage, was earning £2.25 an hour as a landscape gardener. He earned £18 a day, and was so tired when he came home because he had worked an extra couple of hours that he would fall asleep while eating his dinner. It was one of the happiest days in that family’s life when, in 2001, he got a job as a security guard earning £4.10 an hour. Obviously his wages have gone up since.
We are talking about vulnerable workers. The hon. Member for Huntingdon has commented on whether those workers are vulnerable or not, but people who work so hard that they fall asleep during their evening meal and rejoice at earning the princely sum of £4 an hour are the poorest people and most vulnerable workers in the country.
When employers decide not to pay the minimum wage, it is a crime like any other. It is a white collar crime, but it takes money from extremely poor and vulnerable people. Businesses that avoid paying VAT are prosecuted to the full extent of the law because they take money from Her Majesty’s Government. I do not see why there should not be similar penalties for companies that fail to give their workers the wages that are due. The clause and the provisions in clause 8 mean that for employers, choosing not to pay the minimum wage is not a zero penalty option. I know that my constituents in Wakefield will welcome the measure.