Unity Trust Bank is to offer new and existing customers which are accredited living wage employers a 50 per cent reduction in its lending fees, in support of Living Wage week.
The specialist charity and social enterprise bank's managing director, Richard Wilcox, said the move was both ethically right, and commercially sound. “We encourage other employers to show responsibility and commitment to their staff by ensuring they receive a fair wage,” he said.
Unity Trust Bank is the most popular primary bank for charities with incomes of less than £1m according to the Charity Finance Banking Survey 2013.
The Living Wage campaign aims to encourage employers to pay people a wage that enables them to live at a socially acceptable standard that cannot be met on the national minimum wage. It calculates that a living wage rate is at least £8.80 in London, and £7.65 outside the capital, significantly above the national minimum wage of £6.31 for workers aged 21 and over.
A Unity Trust Bank spokeswoman said the 50 per cent reduction in lending fees for accredited living wage employers would be available for a limited time, and at present is planned to run until June 2014.
Elsewhere, ShareAction has started a campaign to urge people to email their pension fund or ISA provider, urging them to support the payment of living wages by FTSE100 companies in their investment portfolios.
Catherine Howarth, chief executive at ShareAction, said: “Despite posting huge profits and paying executives sky-high bonuses, many big businesses in the FTSE 100 still don’t pay their staff enough to live on... This is no longer an issue that businesses can ignore.
“Together, our pension funds are worth billions of pounds. These big investors have the financial clout to demand that companies they invest in do the right thing. The biggest firms in Britain should be leading the way on the living wage. We want them to commit to tackling low pay as the key, underlying cause of poverty in Britain."
Howarth dismissed the belief that consumers cannot influence the financial system. “Collectively, as savers, our money can have as much of an influence on British companies as the votes we cast in a general election. Through our savings we can demand that businesses address poverty pay.”
Living Wage Week runs from 3 to 9 November.
A number of charities are living wage-accredited employers, including Cafod, NCVO, Save the Children, Unicef, ActionAid, the Young Foundation and Navca.
