Part of 1. 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:42 pm on 31 January 2017.
Well, indeed. She and I were at that meeting with David Davis yesterday. He agreed—he agreed with what we said, but the question is, of course, agreeing is one thing, action is another. The point was made—and she made the point—that we have not seen prosecutions for breaches of minimum-wage legislation, largely because it’s not quite as straightforward as that. She will know—I’ve mentioned in this Chamber before now—that I have heard believable testimony from Polish workers particularly that they are being paid the minimum wage, but there are other methods that are used in order to deduct money from them, such as unrealistic bonds when they go into accommodation—bonds against damage and, when they get there, they find the accommodation is white furniture, white carpets, white walls, and it’s very difficult to keep it in full order. We made the point, both of us, yesterday, that there’s a huge amount of work to do in order to make sure that these people are brought to account, these unscrupulous employers, because she is quite right—they exploit migrant workers and lower standards, as a result, for workers in the whole of the UK. Unfortunately, many of the people who sit at the moment in the UK Government are not interested in the rights either of migrant workers or British workers.