Min wage should be lower up north to make it higher down south.

[Witchofwisteria]

Hear me out. Minimum wage should be given out on more of a regional basis. I think this would help spread the wealth and prevent poverty in such crushingly expensive places like London?

Example: If you live in Hull minimum wage should be £7ph but if you live in London it should be £15ph. Purely because you can rent a lush 3 bed house in Hull for £400-£600 pcm but in London (rougher areas and outskirts) it would be £1800+ at least.

Seems daft to keep increasing minimum wage nationwide when some areas can clearly get more for their money and therefore require less money to live a reasonable life and some require more! (London needs fast food staff, retail workers and cleaners too!) I think something similar with benefits should also happen but I don't know enough about the ins and outs of universal credit to think about the adjustments required.

Thoughts?

Who do you propose works in the shops in London WeirdCatLady?

London needs minimum wage workers and anyone suggesting otherwise needs their bumps felt.

Where would you draw the line? If Sheffield has cheaper housing stock than Leeds (just picking two random places), then should Sheffield have a lower minimum wage than Leeds? And then, when all businesses move to Sheffield instead because they can get a cheaper workforce, the housing demand would increase and then in turn the cost of housing would increase, so would Sheffield then have to increase their minimum wage?

@PurpleFlower1983

I am asking you to follow through the logic of your statement re people making the choice to live in London....

London doesn't just need the rich. It needs a mixed balanced economy based on a range of professions. That means, not unreasonably, you need to ensure that people who work in London can afford to live there.

Everyone should be able to make the choice to live in London, where they have the basic standard of living at the very least

The current problem is that even basic living standards are beyond the reach of so many who want to work and live in London.

I can’t face watching anything about UC right now. I am sick and tired of being messed about by it all

@A580Hojas I'm not on minimum wage, I'm on slightly more but the only reason I can afford to save for a mortgage Is because I receive quite a high amount of child maintenance from my ex husband. If I didn't get that I wouldn't be able to afford to. Anyway I digress.

*Minimum wage isn’t funded out of one pot.

Business could chose to pay their staff more - the minimum wage just forces them to pay a floor level.

Personally I’d rather that business paid lower paid staff more and reduced the ridiculous gap between those at the top and those at the bottom.

Otherwise the state has to continue to effectively subsidise the poverty wages, set by businesses, in the form of benefits etc.

And all the while, those in benefits are the ones vilified for sponging (when most of them are actually fucking working)*

This with fucking bells on! I work in a school as a ta and pastoral support staff! My wage is so low that I qualify for housing benefit! I work 29.5 hours a week. And have a degree and a shit ton of formal mental health training. It’s criminal. So I’m leaving to retrain in September

I don’t see anything ‘lush’ here, only places available are 3 bed flats, one bog standard house for £625 and the others are £700+

www.rightmove.co.uk/property-to-rent/find.html?locationIdentifier=REGION%5E94430&minBedrooms=3&sortType=1&includeLetAgreed=false

How about everyone gets a living wage instead? If you lower the NMW up here I’m not sure how we would afford to live. Our day to day costs wouldn’t go down, nor would rent or mortgage payments etc so how are we expected to make ends meet? Or is this a percentage reduction in EVERYTHING up north? No, didn’t think so. Just because you could afford to buy morenuo north does not mean that everyone up north can. YABU

no - the minimum wage is set too low anyway - & the reason housing & rent is lower in these areas is because there is less work & what work is there is lower paid anyway - the housing benefit is based on local area rents (the bottom third of an area) hence it is higher in some areas than others.

Which would then encourage companies to move north, save costs and people in expensive areas would be forced to move or lose their jobs

😂😂 bugger off! Don’t see why you should get paid more to do the same thing because you choose to live somewhere more expensive 🤷‍♀️

No, cap housing costs

Jesus! What is the matter with people. Argue for more, not less. In London they have an allowance, weighting to reflect higher costs.
I hate this bring everybody down to the same level mentality. The rich don't use it for themselves. The attitude should be if someone is getting a better wage, good for them, let's extend that.

I don't think minimum wage should be different but national pay scale public sector jobs should. In the private sector wages often reflect the local market and living costs however if you're a nurse, teacher, fire fighter, police officer, prison officer etc you get paid the same wage bands regardless of where you live so a mid scale teacher living in Bradford is much better off than a midscale teacher living in Kent. They do the same job and yes people can move but they'd move away from family, support networks etc and not everyone can live in the North and we need these services provided nationally. A friend of mine is a deputy head living in the North West she has a lovely home and can afford a mortgage on her own with no partner, my aunt is a deputy head in the south East, even with her husband also working they struggle to cover mortgage plus commute and all other bills.

Dontcallme If it's the FMCG company I'm thinking of, they had made a deliberate decision not to increase pay for their Surrey staff to encourage people to take roles in their Newcastle office.

It's not like we already get a shit deal already....

North Yorkshire has the least funding for the 30 free hours funding in the uk despite being the largest county in the north, not being paid a 'living wage' would mean more parents not returning to work due to the rising childcare costs on average nurseries are £45 a day so for workers on a low income your expecting them to be paid less and receive less help too and would ultimately mean less nurseries offering places due to their rising costs too.

London weighting is only for London itself and is a paltry amount compared to the increased living costs

@thatwouldbeanecumenicalmatter they might not be 'lush' but you can't get a bedsit in a rough area where I live for £700 a month and it's not London

Or everyone could just be paid a living wage....

The whole point of the thread is that the "living wage" is different according to where you live, so it's meaningless.

I actually despair at the idea of people in London and the south east looking up to us notherners thinking ‘oh they have it so easy with their cheap house prices’.

I don’t think mant people have any understanding how vastly different infrastructure is up here; how much transport and facilities differs up north. And it’s not all cheap housing. Sure you could rent a 3 bedroomed house in Blackpool for peanuts, but you’d only get work for half the year as after the season finishes it all dries up.

Sometimes It makes m want to pull my hair out.

Yes because it's fair that two people doing the same job in different cities should get paid so vastly different.

Move to Hull!

Great idea. Let’s make more people struggle to feed themselves and keep a roof over their heads. Northerners - fuck ‘em.

This is why we need a revolution.

Which would then encourage companies to move north

Sounds good - about time we got the UK economy more evenly split rather than being concentrated in the SE.

Why is it London or the rest of the country? The whole of the south East, and home counties are pretty bloody expensive and no one gets any kind of 'weighting' there

YABU to use the word "lush" but anyway I still think you're talking bollocks.

I'm in the North West in a very deprived area. Taking the minimum wage as it is now down to £7? What planet are you on?

So the people I know who are massively struggling on what they earn now will be plunged further into poverty. All bills and rent/mortgage will remain the same under your regime so who makes up the shortfall?

I do think London rents are massively unfair and it must be awful to be priced out of the area where you were born and bred.
However, it's not a case of taking away from one half of the country to supplement the other half, it would never work and is grossly unfair.
Rents should be capped in London like in some places in NY where there is rent control.

There is no solution to this situation really which would benefit everyone.
It's a postcode lottery of poverty.