Part of 2. 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:50 pm on 19 September 2017.
The First Minister knows that the policy of my party was in favour of the minimum wage. In the days when I was a member of the Conservative Party, the Conservative Party was against the introduction of a minimum wage, but UKIP has always supported the introduction of a minimum wage, and, of course, there hasn’t been a single prosecution in Wales for breach of minimum wage legislation, even though we know that this is occurring. So, the Welsh Government, for all the protestations of the First Minister, does absolutely nothing to make its own policy work. When I used the word ‘suffer’ in terms of immigration policy, what I meant there was that the scale and speed of this immigration is imposing massive strains and stresses upon not just public services, but also on the incomes of those who are at the bottom end of the income scale. At the moment, we are in a period of economic growth, but of course the problems really become apparent when the economic cycle is on a downswing. There’s a wealth of academic studies, some of which are referred to in this document, which shows—. Such as the study of the Bank of England, for example—it showed that a 10 per cent increase in the proportion of migrants working in particular jobs in particular regions leads to a 2 per cent fall in wages. This is a serious matter in an economy where the average earnings in Wales are only 75 per cent of the UK’s.