Dr. Frank Walsh:

We have done a lot of work on part-time employment and documenting who is part-time and what the hours are. As for how people might respond to the higher wage and labour supply effects, I would guess that people would want to work more. I could not put a number on it but you would expect there would be a positive relationship between people's desired hours and the living wage. The whole idea that firms will be able to attract more workers when the wage is higher is part of the rationale, in the economics literature, for why employment effects are not necessarily seen as negative for modest minimum wages anymore.

Regarding our considerations, we detail these in the report. Each year, we look at the possibility of slowing down or speeding up the progression towards the living wage. On balance, this year we took the view that we should speed up a little bit because unemployment rates are low and we found that we were at this kind of trough and had fallen behind, and for other reasons as well.