Minimum Wage Rise for Two Million Workers.
Around two million of the UK’s lowest-paid workers will get a pay rise from Thursday as the minimum wage goes up. The National Living Wage will rise 2.2% to £8.91, the equivalent of over £345 a year for a full-time employee. It will also be given to 23 and 24-year-olds for the first time, not just those aged 25 and over.
Statutory rates for apprentices and those aged 18-22 will also rise, along with the voluntary “Real Living Wage”.
However, hundreds of thousands of low-paid workers on furlough will see no uplift at all after they were excluded.
Minimum wage increases from 1 April:
From £8.72 to £8.91 an hour for workers over the age of 23
From £8.20 to £8.36 for those aged 21-22
From £6.45 to £6.56 for 18 to 20-year-olds
From £4.55 to £4.62 for under-18s
From £4.15 to £4.30 for apprentices
Ministers said the increases to minimum wages would particularly benefit workers in sectors such as retail, hospitality and cleaning and maintenance.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson said it would be “a welcome boost to families right across the UK”. Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng urged “all workers” to check their pay packets to ensure they were “getting what they are entitled to, and remind employers of their duty to pay the correct wage”.
The voluntary Real Living Wage will rise to £10.85 an hour in London and £9.50 outside the capital, but only a small minority of employers have signed up to pay it.
The foundation promoting it warned there was still a “substantial gap” between the statutory rates and one based on the actual cost of living.
Frances O’Grady, general secretary of the Trades Union Congress, said nobody should be expected to get by on less than the minimum wage.
“Low-paid workers on furlough have bills to pay like everyone else,” she said. “The government should guarantee that everybody will get at least the full rate of the minimum wage. And it should give all minimum wage workers a decent pay rise.”