First of all, to be clear, the workforce partnership council does cover the whole of Wales. It is a Wales-wide body; it has members on it who have a Wales-wide remit. The consultation on agency workers was by no means confined to the workforce partnership council; it was available to any organisation or individual anywhere in Wales, or beyond indeed, to make a contribution to that consultation. The Bill is not a Trojan horse Bill. In fact, it’s anything but. It is a very narrow and very specific and tightly drawn Bill, where amendments will only be allowed if they are able to be brought forward within that very tight and specific ambit. There is no coincidence in the timing of the Bill and anything that happened in the House of Lords or anything that happened here in relation to the Wales Bill. As I explained in my statement, this was a commitment in Labour’s manifesto; it was signalled by the First Minister back in June of last year and the fact that we happened to have these things in front of the Assembly in the same week is simply an accident of timing and nothing more.

In relation to the questions that the Member asked me about the content of the Bill, then the answer is this: we seek to remove those additional impediments that the UK Bill places in the path of trade union members being able to pay their subscriptions in a straightforward way, and trade unions themselves being able to discharge their responsibility on behalf of those members. We are seeking simply to sustain the status quo. It is the Conservative Party that seeks to add new impediments in the path of those ways of doing things. I am entirely content that all the measures that we take in this Bill are consistent with our pursuit of effective social partnership.