UK Minimum Wage To Be Hiked By Boris Johnson In Bid To Woo Low Paid Workers

The national minimum wage is set to be increased in a new move to give the low-paid a post-Brexit boost, chancellor Sajid Javid has revealed.

In yet another signal that a snap election is looming, Javid told the Conservative party conference that he planned to hike the current rate of £8.21 an hour to £10.50 an hour within five years.

Crucially, the increase would also apply to over-21s and not just over-25s, a move that the chancellor said would “reward the hard work of all millennials too”.

Javid announced he was setting a new target for the ‘National Living Wage’, raising it to match two-thirds of median earnings and “giving four million people a well-earned pay rise”.

“It’s clear it’s the Conservatives who are the real party of labour. We are the workers party,” he told the conference in Manchester. 

Javid’s predecessor Philip Hammond asked the US economist Arindrajit Dube to review the evidence for a wage hike earlier this summer.

Boris Johnson is determined to woo low paid workers by hiking their wages as part of a wider effort to tell Leave voters and others that there will be a post-Brexit boost to the economy.

When he was Mayor of London, Johnson introduced a ‘London Living Wage’ which was then picked up by George Osborne and rolled out as a ‘national living wage’.