For the lowest paid the introduction of the National Minimum Wage in April 1999 has had a major impact for good. Taking into account the NMW and the National Living Wage, (introduced in 2016), since 1999 the lowest paid people working in the UK have seen their hourly pay grow faster than all other workers.
This has also had an upwards ripple effect in businesses as managers and supervisors, who earn just above the NMW, have seen their wages increase in order to keep the differential pay gap between them and other workers.
The Low Pay Commission recognise that the NMW has had a transformative effect on the UK’s labour market. In the 1980s and 1990s and before this, the earnings of the lowest paid grew much more slowly than the average worker. In 2018 in real terms the lowest paid 1% of workers earned an additional £2.70 per hour more than they would have done without the NMW, an additional £5,000 a year for the lowest paid full-time workers.
Our professional body, the Chartered Institute of Payroll Professionals runs a one-day course on the National Minimum Wage and other worker entitlements. But if you would rather concentrate on what your business does, and outsource your payroll management to us, we would be delighted to help and assure you of our knowledge and competence in this area. We would love to talk to you.
Our head office team is based in Birmingham, but we work with a wide range of individuals, schools and public sector bodies on all aspects of their outsourced payroll processing and management, saving them time and money.