Focus on living standards in budget, unions urge chancellor

Unions have urged the chancellor to keep focused on raising living standards, targeting child poverty and upping the national minimum wage, in the face of renewed calls from business to change course on employment rights.

- Gwyn Topham

The Trades Union Congress (TUC) said that Rachel Reeves must deliver “a living standards budget” on Wednesday to ease the pressure on working households whose incomes have remained stagnant for more than a decade.

Analysis by the unions showed working people were just £12 a week better off compared with 2008 after a “painful Tory pay hangover”. Real wages grew at an average of just 0.04% each year under the Conservative government between May 2010 and April 2024, it found, while public service workers saw no increase at all.

Paul Nowak, the TUC general secretary, said: “This budget must be a living standards budget.

“Households up and down the country [are] still suffering a painful Tory pay hangover - leaving this Labour government with lots of ground to make up.”