Make Work Pay Programme

6. What progress his Department has made on delivering the make work pay programme.

As the Chancellor announced yesterday, the national living wage will rise to £12.21 an hour, meaning that a full-time worker can earn an extra £1,400 a year. We have also announced the stopping of the use of minimum service levels and tackled late payments for the self-employed. Of course, we have now introduced the Employment Rights Bill, which will raise living standards across the country and provide better support for businesses engaged in good practice. It also makes good on our promise to the British people that we will now make work pay.

I thank the Minister for his answer. In my constituency of Watford, many people are employed in the hospitality, retail and construction sectors and, with a big hospital, in the health and social sector. Will the Minister confirm that the Government’s Make Work Pay plan will bring long-lasting benefits to them and to other workers?

Absolutely. We are determined to ensure that the particular sectors that my hon. Friend mentioned, where low pay and insecurity are rife, will benefit. We are working closely with businesses and employers across the spectrum to ensure that we get the proposals right because, for too long, insecurity and low pay have been rife in the UK economy. That has to change.

I call the shadow Minister.

After receiving millions from the trade union paymasters for its election, Labour is rewarding them with a package of 1970s, French-style workplace regulations, which will increase the cost of doing business in the UK to the tune of £5 billion a year, disproportionately falling on SMEs. That is before the £25 billion body blow to business delivered by the Chancellor yesterday in her anti-business Budget of broken promises. Does the Minister agree with the Office for Budget Responsibility that this Government’s decisions will make workers poorer, not richer, as increased employment taxes are passed on in lower wages, and that business investment will fall, not rise, as a direct result of this Government?

I find it incredible that the Opposition quote French-style labour laws, because when they introduced the minimum services legislation, they always held up France as the example of where that works already. I wish they would make their minds up. The implication behind the question about trade union funding says rather more about their attitude to how legislation is made in this country than ours. We do things because we believe in them. If he looks carefully at what the OBR is saying, £1,400 into people’s pockets as a result of the national living wage increase is a fantastic achievement that we should all be proud of.