Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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19. To ask the Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation if we need to establish the living wage of €11.50 as a new minimum wage to combat low pay and the phenomena of the working poor; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [2095/16]

Gerald Nash (Louth, Labour)
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The Living Wage concept is grounded in the idea that a person’s wage should be sufficient to maintain a safe, decent standard of living. At an individual level the resources required to achieve a minimum essential standard of living is very dependent on family circumstances and thus the interaction of individual earnings with household income and State-provided supports such as Child Benefit, Family Income Supplement as well as supports available in relation to housing, education and health all contribute to an individual’s standard of living.

The statutory National Minimum Wage and the Living Wage are separate concepts. The Living Wage is a voluntary societal initiative centred on the social, business and economic case to ensure that, wherever it can be afforded, employers will pay a rate of pay that provides an income that is sufficient to meet an individual’s basic needs, such as housing, food, clothing, transport and healthcare. The Living Wage is voluntary and has no legislative basis and is therefore not a statutory entitlement. It is different to the National Minimum Wage which is a statutory entitlement and has a legislative basis.

Making work pay continues to be a cornerstone of this Government’s agenda and the establishment of the Low Pay Commission on a statutory basis in July last year is one of the key commitments in the Statement of Government Priorities agreed in July 2014. The Commission’s main function is to, on an annual basis, examine and make recommendations on the national minimum wage, with a view to securing that the national minimum wage, where adjusted, is adjusted incrementally over time having had regard to changes in earnings, productivity, overall competitiveness and the likely impact any adjustment will have on employment and unemployment levels. The Commission presented its first report to me in July 2015 in which it recommended an increase of 50 cents per hour to the minimum hourly rate bringing it to €9.15. That increase, which was accepted by Government, came into effect on 1st January last.