Well, it’s a problem of supply and demand. If you increase supply relative to the demand, you will depress the price. It’s the inevitable consequence, I’m afraid. Of course, there are exploitative employers, and we’ve referred to this many times. David Rowlands, in this Chamber, has raised many times the problem of car washes, for example, and people who are employed at a fraction of the minimum wage through gangmasters and agencies, which are very, very difficult to police, and we know there hasn’t been a single prosecution in Wales for breach of the minimum wage legislation that’s now been in force for many years. So, there is undoubtedly wage compression going on, in addition to the illegal employment of individuals at poverty wages. The only way in which we will begin to solve this problem is if we do introduce some system of immigration control that is meaningful and which is related to employment opportunities that exist. At the minute, the United Kingdom is in a relative economic upswing, so lots of these difficulties are disguised. If we, as we inevitably will do in due course, go into a downswing again, then the problem is going to be manifested not just in terms of wage compression, but actually increasing unemployment. Yet again, it’s the people at the bottom of the heap in society who are the ones who’ll be paying the price.

Admittedly, in Wales immigration has not created these kinds of problems to anything like the same extent that they have in parts of England, because 90 per cent of those who’ve come here from the EU actually end up in the south and south-east of England. But the United Kingdom is a relatively small—geographically—country, and has a highly homogeneous labour market, and the ripple effects are felt further out from the epicentre. Therefore, it does have a depressing effect upon wages in Wales, which is of great seriousness because Wales is the poorest part of the United Kingdom, and in fact parts of Wales are some of the poorest parts of the continent of Europe. It’s a scandal, actually, that average incomes in Wales relative to the rest of the country have gone down in recent years, and our GVA is about 75 per cent of the rest of the United Kingdom. Therefore, anything that exacerbates these problems for those on low incomes is much to be deprecated. I gave way, certainly.