Well, Llywydd, let me begin by trying to find some areas of common ground with the Member. I’m very happy to put on record, as he did, that this is not a paper about asylum seekers and refugees, and the strong support of the Welsh Government to asylum and refugee policies that welcome people to Wales who have faced such awful experiences elsewhere in the world and who come here for sanctuary. Let me say as well that we are proud in Wales of our record post devolution. We have had a faster drop in economic inactivity in Wales than across the United Kingdom as a whole, and of course there is nothing in our document at all that suggests that we will not go on doing everything we can to build up the skills of people who live in Wales already, to create new opportunities for people who have been outside the workplace and who wish to return to it. But we do not for a moment align ourselves with those people who, as Mark Isherwood began, suggest that somehow immigration and the presence of people from the European Union in our midst is because employers have used that as an excuse not to invest in young people.

The employers that I have met over this summer have gone out of their way to explain to me the actions that they take, working with their local further education colleges and so on, to try and prepare people who live in their communities to take up job opportunities that are available. But even when they have done that to the maximum extent, they still need to be able to attract people from beyond their own boundaries in order to secure the continued employment of people from those local areas. Llywydd, the First Minister gave a very telling example when he introduced this paper a couple of weeks ago, of a hotel in a part of rural Wales that employs 100 people: 80 of those people come from the local community already, and 20 people come from other parts of the European Union. And the person who runs that hotel said absolutely clearly, ‘The jobs of the 80 people depend on my ability to be able to attract the 20 people to come in to support this business. If I can’t get the 20 people, then the 80 people who live here already won’t have jobs either.’ That’s why our proposals are proposals that are right for Wales, and this Government and our responsibilities are the focus, not what might be right in other parts, but what is right for Wales. And we believe that this paper, which is in the pragmatic mainstream of proposals, we believe, provides a blueprint to do exactly that.

Is there more that we can do as a Government to ensure the rights that ought to be there to protect people who come into the workplace through entry-level jobs and so on? Well, I said in my statement that there is more that we can do and intend to do, building on our success, with a code of practice on ethical employment, on the two-tier code on our social partnership model, and I can say to the Member that our actions in this area are very carefully observed and challenged where necessary in the workforce partnership council and other places where people who work with us on this agenda come to advise the Welsh Government.

Finally, in relation to the migration quota issue, let me say again, Llywydd, that is not our preferred policy. It’s absolutely set out in the document. That is not what we think would work best for Wales or the United Kingdom, but if the UK Government is determined to put migration controls ahead of the needs of the UK economy and does decide to do this by net migration quotas, then we are convinced that a system in which we have a quota for Wales will be in our best interests. It’s the policy advocated by the City of London Corporation for London and by the all-party parliamentary group on social integration at the House of Commons. It can be made to work if we have to make it work. It’s not the approach that we would choose for Wales or for the UK.