Last week I visited my local Royal Mail sorting office, and all the talk was about the way in which private companies are eating into the profitable parts of their business, while they continue to have an obligation to deliver the universal postal service. These predators have no obligation to meet the pay and conditions that Royal Mail workers have fought for over the years, and they are, unfortunately, exploiting the large numbers of desperate young unemployed people, offering employment packages far inferior to the Royal Mail counterparts. They are paid by the number of packages they get rid of, regardless of whether there’s anyone in or there’s a safe place to store the parcel. An undercover TNT deliverer explained that,

‘Denied any fixed hours of employment, I was forced to hustle for my next day's work on an almost daily basis. Sometimes I took a gamble to come in as a “relief worker”, arriving at the depot at 7.30am in the hope that someone would have dropped out so I could cover their rounds.’

Of course, if they didn’t get the work, they’d still be having to pay for their transport to get to the employment.

This is entirely reminiscent of the insecurity of dockworkers in the first half of the twentieth century, forced to compete with each other every day for the chance of work, with all the damaging impact this had on their family income and family life. Companies like Amazon are exploiting the universal delivery obligation to dump on the Royal Mail the least attractive delivery rounds, while, at the same time, cherry-picking the easiest, most concentrated delivery rounds, using the Royal Mail’s very own performance monitoring of the speed with which Amazon parcels have been delivered to identify the places where they can make an easy killing. You can be certain that all the Amazon delivery drivers will be on zero-hours contracts.

This, frankly, is an unsustainable business model for Royal Mail, and we should all worry that it will, eventually, lead to the undermining of the universal postal service obligation, which, as you may recall, ends in 2022. If we continue to have a society that only knows about the price of everything and the value of nothing, that is undoubtedly what will happen.

According to the Office for National Statistics, real wages have undergone the most prolonged fall in 70 years under this regime. Over 400,000 people over 25 years old have been on zero-hours contracts, according to them, with the same employer for more than 12 months. This level of insecurity, given the consistency with which they’ve been turning up at work, is completely unacceptable, in my view. The Resolution Foundation highlights that 93p per hour is the penalty for zero-hours workers doing the same work as those on permanent contracts. So, I would like to suggest that we have to remind ourselves that workers in the UK currently depend on EU legislation for many of their rights and protections at work. And although the UK Government has promised that such rights will be transferred into British law, we have to remind ourselves that the Conservatives opposed many of these hard-won rights and protections when they were first introduced and dismissed them as red tape.

Now, UKIP, who have proposed this motion, as Jeremy Miles has pointed out, have said, in the past, that they would put an end to most legislation regarding matters such as weekly working hours, holidays and holiday overtime, redundancy or sick pay, and provide a statutory standard, very short-term employment contract template. That was in your small business manifesto in 2013, so I’d be very keen, in your summing up, to find out what is the extent of your Damascene conversion and—[Interruption.] Well, that was in—. Well, that’s—.

So, in response to Bethan Jenkins, I do not agree that it is only Plaid Cymru that proposed zero-hours contracts. I would remind you that, in the 2015 election, Labour promised employees a legal right to a regular contract after 12 weeks’ work. In August last year, Jeremy Corbyn had pledged to introduce the New Zealand-style laws that force employers to give workers guaranteed hours in a written contract. New Zealand shows what can be done, and the law forces employers to guarantee a minimum number of hours’ work each week, and workers can refuse extra hours without repercussions. That, of course, is not the state of zero-hours workers in this country. Cardiff Central, unfortunately, has the highest proportion of zero-hours workers anywhere in Wales. If people even contest the type of hours they’re doing, they are then turned down a shift or threatened with having hours taken away. This level of vulnerability and insecurity is causing major mental health problems, as well as genuine hardship, as people are simply unable to know whether or not their wages are going to be reliable, and whether they’re going to be able to pay the wages the following week. So, I think zero-hours contracts need to be abolished.