Angela Rayner gives a thumbs-up as she leaves 10 Downing Street, following the results of the election Labour’s flagship plans to introduce minimum pay levels in low-paid sectors like social care are at risk of failure without the full support of employers, the Institute for Government think tank has warned.
IfG programme director Nehal Davidson worked for five years as a civil servant in former New Zealand premier Jacinda Ardern’s government, where fair pay agreements were introduced for a year before being axed., Ms Davidson says the UK Government’s plans for the legislation to be introduced in its first 100 days are ambitious, given it took nearly five years for the same measures to be implemented in New Zealand due to wrangling between unions and employers over better pay and conditions.
She says that while improving pay in social care is a good place to start, New Zealand “offers an unfortunate case study”. “This is unlikely to allow time for meaningful collaboration with trade unions and businesses on what it has described as the ‘the biggest upgrade to workers’ rights in a generation’.
The UK Government may also have difficulty in persuading social care employers who are funded through cash-strapped local government to agree to better pay and conditions if town halls do not receive an increase in their budgets from Whitehall, Ms Davidson writes. In its blueprint for workers’ rights reforms, the Plan to Make Work Pay, Labour pledged to introduce the agreements to empower “workers and the trade unions that represent them to negotiate fair pay and conditions”.