Labour Pledge To Link Minimum Wage To Cost Of Living

The Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, has pledged that a Labour Government would link the National Minimum Wage / National Living Wage to the actual cost of living, in the same way that the Real Living Wage and the London Living Wage currently do. She stated in her speech to Labour Party Conference on the 9th October 2023, that: "It was the last Labour government which finally delivered on the promise of Keir Hardie to implement a national minimum wage....And so the next Labour government will go further....A minimum wage taking account of the real cost of living and finally we will have a genuine living wage." The Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, Angela Rayner, stated in her conference speech a day earlier that: "We will change the Low Pay Commission’s remit so that the minimum wage will for the first time take account of the cost of living." Labour have previously indicated that they would scrap the lower bands and have just one minimum wage rate that applies across the board.