The Living Wage Campaign called for every worker in the country to earn enough to provide their family with the essentials of life.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation funded the Centre for Research in Social Policy (CRSP) at Loughborough University[10] to calculate the Minimum Income Standard (MIS), a UK-wide figure taking an average from across the whole country and independent of the higher living costs in London.

Professor Sir George Bain who set the minimum wage in 1999 said employers could afford to pay much more but acknowledged enforcement could cause unemployment in the retail sector.

The national minimum wage aims to protect the lowest paid from exploitation, but its level often falls short of the local cost of living[15] and it has increasingly failed to prevent in-work poverty without welfare payments by the state to supplement earnings.

It was phased in between 2016 and 2020 and was set at a significantly higher level than previous minimum wage rates.

This included two reports funded by the Trust for London[22] and carried out by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) and Resolution Foundation: "Beyond the Bottom Line" [23] and "What Price a Living Wage?".

[27] Research by the Office for National Statistics in 2014 indicated that at that time the proportion of jobs outside London paying less than the living wage was 23%.

[28] Research published in 2018 by the accountants KPMG indicated that the take-up of the living wage had started to fall.

[30] Ed Miliband, the leader of the Labour Party in opposition from 2010 until 2015, supported a living wage[31] and proposed tax breaks for employers who adopted it.

Other supporters include The Guardian newspaper columnist Polly Toynbee, Church Action on Poverty,[36] the Scottish Low Pay Unit, and Bloomsbury Fightback!