by Our News Desk

WORKERS in south-west England are over £2,000 worse off in real terms than they were when the coalition government took power in 2010.

Delegates to the annual conference of South West region of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in north Devon on Friday will be told that even though inflation has fallen in recent months it will to take years for wages to recover to their pre-recession levels.

South West TUC regional secretary Nigel Costley said: “Poverty pay is a real issue. More than one in five workers in the south-west is paid below the living wage. More employers can afford to pay the living wage. For large companies in sectors such as food production, banking, construction and software/computing — which employ over one million low-waged workers — paying all workers the living wage would mean an increase of less than 0.5 per cent of the total wage bill.”

The living wage is £7.85 an hour outside London and £9.15 in the capital.

At the same time as wages have fallen, top directors’ pay has risen by 26 per cent in real terms since the 2008 crash, meaning the average wage for a chief executive at Britain’s top 100 companies in 2014 was £3,334,000 — 130 times the average annual wage in south-west England.

Nigel Costley said: “Owning a house is becoming a pipe dream. The average local house price is now more than five times the local annual salary in every local authority area across the south-west.”