To make the same old point again about income tax and the minimum wage

So, the national living wage is to rise in the spring to £11.44 an hour. With a 37.5 hour working week, about the average for a full time worker, this is £22,308 a year.

The income tax (and NI) allowance is £12,570. Roughly enough you pay 12% NI and 20% income tax on the gap between those two - 32%. Or £3,116.

Something we regard as monstrous. The entire point of the minimum wage - not that there should be one at all - is that this is the minimum just and righteous amount that someone should gain for their labour. Nicking three grand of it - or 15% or so of the total amount - is monstrous.

Or as Sophy Ridge has noted:

Number of people David Cameron’s Coalition Gvt took out of paying income tax: 3.2m (Treasury, 2015)

Number of people the current Gvt brought back into paying income tax: 4 million (OBR, today)

We spent the period 2004 to 2010 shouting about this and our shouting, along with more measured tones from the CPS, led to that personal allowance rising to this current £12,500. Which was, as our demand was, that the allowance and the full year minimum wage should be the same. The reason for that specific sum is that’s what the minimum wage was in the year the government announced the target.

Our original desire, our original insistence, was that the personal allowance and the minimum wage should be the same amount and that no Chancellor be allowed to diverge from that. We repeat that.

For here we are a decade later and someone on the minimum wage pays 15% of their income in incomes taxes. Further, someone working 22 hours a week - part time we’d call that - on that minimum wage is facing that dual burst of incomes taxation. Monstrous, stop it immediately.