Part of 1. 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:48 pm on 16 May 2017.
Well, no—if there is to be a cap, a cap is a cap. You can’t say, ‘Well, the cap doesn’t exist for certain professions.’ And that is something that we need, to my mind, to avoid. We have 80,000 EU citizens in Wales, out of 3 million people, so it’s a tiny proportion of the population. I take his point that there were many who felt that wages have been depressed as a result. Part of that lies in the fact there’s been a complete failure to prosecute for minimum wage legislation—no prosecutions at all, as far as I’m aware. I have to remind him that, in his former party, they were against the minimum wage, and, as a result of that, that would have driven wages down even further than now. There is exploitation. I’ve heard stories of exploitation of EU citizens who come to Wales. That needs to be cracked down on and it needs to be prosecuted, in the same way that those who try to employ people below the minimum wage, those people who try to get around employment legislation, should be prosecuted according to the law, and the law should be strengthened to ensure that nobody is exploited in the future. That’s exactly what a Labour Government would do in Westminster.