The majority of children in poverty live in households where one or both parents are working. The cause is not just low pay, but also working practices that some of us thought had disappeared with the ending of the second world war. We’ve seen the growth not only of zero-hours contracts and low guaranteed hours contracts, but also a huge growth of agency workers and self-employed contractors. Whilst there are areas of the economy where each of those suits both employers and employees—zero-hours contracts for things such as irregular sports events, agency workers to fill a skills gap, self-employed sub-contractors for short-term need, and low guaranteed hours to fit in with caring responsibilities—unfortunately, those are not the only reasons the above contract types are used.

Zero-hours contracts offer no guaranteed minimum hours of work; they can require a worker to be available to work at all times and give the employer total control over the amount of work each worker gets each week. Low guaranteed hours, such as one hour a day over a five or six-day week, are similar to zero-hours contracts, but they ensure that everyone clocks in daily, so that the employer can then decide how long they will be needed to work. Agency workers and self-employed sub-contractors have the equivalent of zero-hours contracts without even the minimum employment protection. All the above explains why the majority of people in poverty in Wales are also in work.

Children aren’t the major breadwinners in any household. Children are in poverty because their parents are in poverty. The only way to deal with it is to get their parents out of poverty. What I’m asking the Minister is: what is being done to ensure—and you talked earlier in answer to Bethan Jenkins about 44 public bodies in Wales—what’s to ensure that they all pay the proper living wage? And what’s in there to make sure they all employ people under decent contracts, not one of the four I talked about earlier? And what is being done to ensure that the sub-contractors that come in also work to those decent terms and conditions? The sort of terms and conditions when I joined the workforce in the late 1970s were the norm, which now seem to be abnormal. So, what is the Welsh Government doing to ensure that the Welsh pound is being used to employ people under decent contracts, with decent terms and conditions and a decent wage?