Is a £10 minimum wage a good idea?

Dear Mary Creagh

I would like to vote for you on the 8^th June, I think you have been a good local MP for Wakefield.

Before I am able to vote for you, can you please clarify one of your party’s policies, in particular that of raising the minimum wage to £10 per hour.

I currently co own a small performance marketing business based in Wakefield, employing nearly 20 people.

We have 2 members of staff on minimum wages as we internally train them. With the exception of finance and tech team members, we have trained all our staff, as we are in a very niche market working internationally with no local competition, so there is no locally trained talent pool to recruit from.

So, if a Labour government is elected in June and during the parliament minimum wage goes up by 25%! Surely then everyone currently on £10 per hour needs to get a 25% pay raise too and everyone currently on £15 per hour will expect the same pay rise also?

Now, I appreciate this is a slight extreme example but lets suppose I offered each member of our team a 25% pay raise because we are fair to our staff. That would cost around £10,000 per month, and unable to pass the cost on to our customer -the only way to finance that would be to make 4 members of staff redundant, which in turn would put the whole business in serious jeopardy.

I love the sentiment of a £10 minimum wage but, is it practical? Is this policy a headline grabber to gain easy votes but will never be brought into law? Or is it the real intention of a future Labour government?

Kind regards

Paul Kemshell