LONDON, May 29 (Reuters) – Britain’s government is not committed to ending a lower minimum wage for workers aged 18-20 before the next national election \u200cdue by 2029, a government minister said on Friday after a report \u200cwarned of a ‘lost generation’ and rising youth joblessness.<\/p>\n
Labour promised before winning a large election victory in July \u200b2024 “to remove the discriminatory age bands, so all adults are entitled to the same minimum wage”.<\/p>\n
Asked if that meant doing so by the end of the current parliamentary term, junior minister for pensions Torsten Bell said the pledge was not a commitment to \u200cdo that.<\/p>\n
“We’re committed to our \u2060manifesto… but that manifesto did not set out the timeline,” he said in a BBC radio interview on Friday.<\/p>\n
Voters who thought \u2060the manifesto commitment was a promise to be delivered during the government’s initial term in office were making “an understandable mistake”, he added.<\/p>\n
Since the election, the minimum wage for younger workers \u200bhas \u200brisen 26% to \u00a310.85 ($14.55) an hour, while that for \u200bworkers aged 21 and over \u200cincreased 11% to \u00a312.71.<\/p>\n
Many businesses blame the minimum wage increases for reducing the number of younger workers they hire, especially in sectors such as retail and hospitality.<\/p>\n
In a report on Thursday, former government minister Alan Milburn said the higher minimum wage was not clearly to blame for the increased number of young people not in employment, education \u200cor training (NEET), which now exceeds 1 million.<\/p>\n
But he \u200burged policymakers to take recent trends into account \u200band not do things that might \u200bmake things worse.<\/p>\n
Britain’s minimum wage rates are set by a \u200cgovernment-appointed body, the Low Pay Commission, which \u200breceives an annual remit \u200bon how to approach the task and takes labour market conditions, inflation and other factors into account.<\/p>\n
In March, the government changed the remit around the \u200byouth minimum wage rate \u200cto allow the Low Pay Commission “full flexibility to determine the pace and \u200bultimate timing” of the promised alignment with the adult rate.<\/p>\n
($1 = 0.7457 pounds)<\/p>\n
(Reporting \u200bby David Milliken; Editing by Alistair Smout)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LONDON, May 29 (Reuters) – Britain’s government is not committed to ending a lower minimum wage for workers…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":51694,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4],"tags":[25713,24931,5,6],"class_list":["post-51693","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-uk","tag-government-minister","tag-minimum-wage","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/116658049123427574","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51693","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51693"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51693\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}