Kemi Badenoch has sparked a fresh row after suggesting that the national minimum wage is “over-burdening” businesses.
The Tory leadership contender made the comment at the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham.
She said: “There’s a cafe in my constituency that closed down and the lady who owned it said, ‘I can’t afford to pay the wages any more. I can’t afford minimum wage. I can’t afford for my staff to go on maternity’.
“We are overburdening businesses. We are overburdening them with regulation, with tax. People aren’t starting businesses any more because they’re too scared.”
A Badenoch campaign source told HuffPost UK her comment had been “ridiculously over-interpreted”, but refused to say whether she backs the minimum wage, which was introduced by Labour in 1998.
The source said: “She thinks too much regulation is burdening businesses. We need economic growth and reducing the amount of regulation will help with that, and she wants us to debate this. She’s not putting out policy, it’s about ideas.”
Asked specifically whether the minimum wage was an example of businesses being over-burdened, the source failed to answer.
The latest row comes after Badenoch appeared to suggest that statutory maternity pay was “excessive”.
She was later forced to issue a clarification in which she said: “Contrary to what some have said, I clearly said the burden of regulation on businesses had gone too far… of course I believe in maternity pay.”
A Labour source said: “The mask is slipping. After suggesting maternity pay is ‘excessive’, how much more damage does Kemi Badenoch want to inflict on working families?
“The Tory war on the lowest paid in our country shows they haven’t learnt a thing. The Conservatives aren’t listening to the public and have no solutions to fix the mess they made.”