London Living Wage (LLW)
Living Wage employers pay all their direct employees and other employees working directly on external contracts, such as security staff, cleaners, catering staff etc, the London Living Wage. The GLA group and an increasing number of employers across London (almost 2,600) are Living Wage employers. This means that more than 100,000 employees are working in jobs that have received an uplift to the LLW.
The London Living Wage has increased faster than the official inflation measures and general pay rises. The proportion of employees across London earning below this level increased between 2010 and 2015, though it was more stable from 2015-2020. Around one in six employee jobs in London were paid below the London Living Wage in 2021. The figures for 2020 and 2021 include some people furloughed under the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme, at a reduced rate of pay, but this also sits alongside job losses which occurred during the coronavirus pandemic in the UK. The data suggest that these job losses may have been disproportionally those on the lowest levels of pay. In 2022, the proportion of jobs in London paid below LLW had fallen substantially further to less than one in seven.
In the rest of the UK, the proportion of employee jobs paid below the UK Living Wage has been closer to the proportion of employee jobs in London paid below LLW since 2019 and fell below the London figure for the first time in 2022. The UK Living Wage is higher than the National Living Wage, but lower than the London Living Wage and is also sometimes described as the Real Living Wage. As with the London Living Wage, the rate is calculated annually using actual living costs.