I’ll be very brief—just simply to say it’s interesting that UKIP is not convinced by the Conservatives’ arguments. I think simply peddling the arguments out for a third serving doesn’t improve on them. This is such a cheap and simple process—deducting wages from source—as my colleague, Dawn Bowden has already said. This is no different than deducting the charitable donation or repayment of a loan for a bicycle or whatever it might be, and it’s all done by machine—it doesn’t cost anything. So, clearly the trade unions are making a charitable contribution to their employers. We had no evidence from any of the witnesses who we received evidence from, as part of the Equality, Local Government and Communities Committee scrutiny of this, and, in fact, the NHS employers organisation pointed out that it enabled employers to understand the number of members in any one union and to gain an understanding of the relative trade union membership across the organisation.

So, it seems to me that it both provides transparency and ease of transfer of the money. There’s nothing wrong with direct debit, but the reason why the trade unions are urging members to transfer to direct debit is because, in other parts of the UK, all members will be obliged to do that. So, it’s very difficult to see how, in Wales, we need to do that in our public sector when everybody, including all the employers, seem to be perfectly content to deduct union subs from source.