Meeting of the Parliament 23 April 2014
Well read, Mr Brodie—you got all the way through that. I will deal specifically with the legal points, including that one, later in my speech. Let us not hide behind legal advice and red herrings. Let us have a bill that makes a difference to people in Scotland’s communities, not to the lawyers in St Andrew’s House.
What impact can the living wage have? Currently, 400,000 people in Scotland do not earn the living wage, and 36 per cent of them are under 25. Yet when we tried to make a positive change at stage 2 of the Procurement Reform (Scotland) Bill, the SNP voted down that change. When I look at the SNP’s attitude and what it is doing in the white paper, it strikes me that it is more interested in bringing down corporation tax for businesses such as Brian Souter’s Stagecoach than it is in paying cleaners the living wage.
Payment of the living wage would make a striking difference to women workers, who make up 64 per cent of the 400,000 workers that I mentioned. That is 256,000 women. If we used the £10 billion that we spend to reach out, we could reach out to many of those thousands of women workers.
It is one thing to appoint two new women ministers to the Cabinet, as Parliament agreed to do yesterday, but we have to wonder about voting for pay rises of £32,000 for ministers when cleaners who are working on Scottish Government contracts are not being paid the living wage. That is unacceptable.
There is rank hypocrisy on the issue among elements of the SNP. At the recent SNP conference, MSP after MSP, including the Deputy First Minister, queued up to have their photograph taken pledging their support for paying the living wage to their staff. However, there are workers on Scottish Government contracts who are not being paid the living wage. In the gallery this afternoon, there are staff from the national museum of Scotland shop, who are paid £6.53 per hour. The national museum of Scotland is an iconic institution, but its shop staff, who are working on behalf of the Scottish Government, are not being paid the living wage. For SNP members to pose for photographs with banners that say that they support the living wage is hypocrisy.