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But fear not, it lives on in another home: from now on, NE Child Poverty Commission blogs will be posted at http://www.nechildpoverty.org.uk/blog. Please head over there and follow us.
This post should really be appearing in the new look Commission website, but that will not go live for another week or so – watch this space. In the meantime, I’m posting it here.
The Living Wage Foundation have kindly provided details on the living wage employers in the North East, and I’ve done some simple analysis, below. This is not perfect as:
Despite these caveats, it should hopefully spur some people into doing more to promote the Living Wage within their local area. Because the bottom line is we need more Living Wage employers in the North East.
[In all of the graphs below, the vertical axis shows the number of accredited Living Wage employers in the region at the beginning of April 2014]
Living Wage employers in the North East are predominantly small, voluntary sector organisations:
Reflecting this, most Living Wage employers describe their industry as ‘Charity’, but there is a wide range of other activities covered:
The main cluster of Living Wage employers is, perhaps unsurprisingly, found in Newcastle, especially in the West End. There are some Living Wage employers in most parts of the region, but not all: there are none in Sunderland, South Tyneside, Darlington or Stockton.
Of the region’s MPs, Chi Onwurah has comfortably the most constituent Living Wage employers, and there are 20 MPs, almost two thirds of the region’s MPs, where none of the employers in their constituency is a registered Living Wage employer.
If you are, or know of, an employer working towards Living Wage accreditation, or have recently become accredited, please let me know.
North East Child Poverty 