Posted on 2014-06-23 | 07:03

Roger is supporting a campaign by the union GMB to raise the national minimum wage for its members to £10 per hour. He commented: “In one of the world’s richest countries, it is shameful that people can work full time and yet still live in poverty or have to rely on benefits to provide for their families. With more people in poverty now in work than out of it, it is clear that the current minimum wage is too low to provide a decent standard of living.”

Birmingham is one of the ten areas in the country with the lowest average income, at just £12,793 per person each year.

Roger tabled a Written Parliamentary Question to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills to ask the Government to carry out a cost-benefit assessment of the impact of lifting the minimum wage to £10 per hour. He commented: “I doubt that the Government will bother to assess this. However, allowing employers to pay poverty wages benefits shareholders and CEOs at the expense of ordinary working people and, of course, the taxpayer. Why should wealthy corporations continue to have their wage bill subsidised by the Government while the people who made them rich live in poverty?”

Recent research by the Poverty and Social Exclusion in the United Kingdom project found that over the last 30 years the number of households below the minimum standard of living has more than doubled, from 14 per cent to 33 percent, even though the economy doubled in size over the same time period. The study also found that one in every six adults in paid work is poor, while around 1.5 million children live in households which cannot afford to heat their home.