Real Living Wage: Portsmouth City Council aims to being in wages for all staff - here's what it means

Councillor Gerald Vernon-Jackson said there was cross-party support for the move, which would require it to extend the 2018 agreement for directly-employed staff to those - mainly working in social care - it contracts.

'I think all parties think this is the right thing to do and want to move towards making sure it happens,' he said at Thursday's meeting of the council's employment committee.

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'It is a process that we're going to have to go through as a council to identify the savings that need to be made to be able to make sure that we can pay for this.

'If we're going to do this, we have to make sure that this is done from sustainable funding sources, not just a one-off.

The worst possible thing we could do would be for people on the minimum wage would be to increase it in one year and then remove it the next year'

He said he was 'encouraged' that estimates of the cost had fallen to £2.5m but said it was still 'not easy' to find that amount of money given other pressures on its budget.

Calls from within the council to extend the real living wage of £10.90 per hour to all its workers have been led by the Labour group with its leader Cal Corkery having attempted to have it included in this year's budget.

The minimum wage for people over 23 is £9.50 an hour, although the government announced in its autumn statement that this would rise to £10.42 next year.

Portsmouth Unison representative Jon Woods said rolling out the real living wage would be costly but that it would help address recruitment difficulties.

'It's difficult to quantify, but nevertheless, they're very real costs and very sizeable costs and they must be taken into account,' he said, adding that the council also needed to consider 'the human cost of not paying staff who are contracted by the council the real living wage'.

'We are seeing many care providers having a recruitment retention crisis. It's a national problem and it's clearly impacting in Portsmouth. The impact on our service users is very serious for some of them and in some cases, getting worse.

'Implementing the real living wage would be a game changer. It really would transform services.'

Care providers across the city have warned of the 'crisis' in recruitment in the sector with many staff moving into NHS roles for better pay and job conditions.

An estimated 90 per cent of the cost to the council of extending the real living wage is in its adult social care contracts.

The employment committee agreed to 'ask' the Cabinet to consider including accreditation as it begins putting together next year's budget.