Only 45,000 out of 5 million low paid workers benefiting from a Living Wage

'Beyond the Bottom Line -The challenges and opportunities of a living wage' is a comprehensive new report from the Resolution Foundation and the Institute for Public Policy Research. It highlights the enormous scale of in work poverty in the UK, particularly in private services such as leisure and retail, and the very limited implementation of Living Wage initiatives to date:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/21/living-wage-large-employers
http://www.resolutionfoundation.org/media/media/downloads/Beyond_the_Bottom_Line_-_FINAL.pdf

The report identifies the huge potential of public sector procurement for specifying a living wage for outsourced workers in job types which are disproportionately low paid:

'The UK’s public services industry is now the most developed in the world and estimates suggest that private and voluntary providers of public services now employ around 1.2 million people (Department of Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform 2008). Given the concentration of outsourced workers in typically low-paid roles in social care, leisure services, cleaning and security, the share of outsourced workers paid less than the living wage is likely to be substantially higher than the UK average of 20 per cent and sub-contracted low-paid work should continue to be a central focus of living wage campaigns'