I'm pleased to rise today to support this motion and was very glad to see it tabled by Jane Hutt in the first instance and supported by so many colleagues. Like, I'm sure, many in this Chamber, I feel very angry that so many of our fellow citizens work so very, very hard and are still poor. I object to people's taxes being used to subsidise bad employers who ought to be able to pay wages without people working full-time having to depend on benefits. And, of course, it is particularly women—often women working a number of part-time jobs—who are affected by low wages, and it is on women's experience that I particularly want to focus today.

It's clear the living wage policy has been a success and, clearly, expanding it has been an important part of the Government's economic and tackling poverty strategies. But, still, an estimated 26 per cent of employees in Wales are paid below the real living wage. That means just over a quarter of our fellow citizens effectively living in in-work poverty. And we mustn't confuse the actual living wage, the real living wage, and what is called the living wage—what is the statutory minimum.

Now, a disproportionate number of those 26 per cent are women, particularly part-time workers and those under 30, and women face many additional economic penalties. The pay gap between women and men—we sometimes call it a gender pay gap, but, actually, it's a sex pay gap, and it's quite important, I think, to use the correct legislation, as it is referred to in the Equality Act 2010—on a median hourly, full-time basis, excluding overtime in April this year, was 7.3 per cent in Wales and 8.6 per cent in the UK. Now, that's, sadly, not because women in Wales are paid any better; it's because men in Wales are paid slightly worse.

In Wales, the gap has increased by 0.9 percentage points, and, in the UK, it's decreased by 0.5 percentage points, so we could argue that, here, we are at risk of travelling in the wrong directions. As Members of the Chamber will know, regulations under the Equality Act place a requirement on all private and voluntary sector employers with 250 employees or more to publish information on their sex pay gap. Following the first round of reporting this year, and based on over 10,000 employers reporting, just over 78 per cent reported that they paid men more than women on average, and, of course, this is focusing on full-time pay, and it doesn't look at the part-time work penalty that we know women suffer from.

We also know that a frighteningly high percentage of new mothers report having negative or possibly even discriminatory experiences, either during pregnancy and on maternity leave, or on their return to work from maternity leave. It's clear that the Government needs to take—the Welsh Government—more action on this, though what they've done already is welcome. Tackling low pay and discrimination against women in the workplace has to become more of a priority, and I very much hope the work that's being done, led at the moment by the leader of the house, will help to contribute towards that.

The minimum wage policy, as I said, has had some successes and it's enabled a discussion of the living wage to become more prominent, but it remains the case that, in Wales, an estimated 8 per cent of jobs pay the legal minimum wage, and some of them less than that. That's leaving a great many of our fellow citizens working very hard and staying very poor. We know, from the Low Pay Commission's work, that over half of those low-paying jobs are concentrated in three sectors: retail, hospitality and cleaning and maintenance. If you take those employed in the private sector, that would also include carers, but because we have, for example, introduced a living wage in the health service, carers, as a whole, don't show up, but, if you take the ones employed by the private sector, they belong there. So, we can't, in my view, have a meaningful discussion in this Chamber about low wages, poverty and economic exploitation without including sex discrimination in the debate.

We must tackle segregation in employment; we must tackle maternity payment penalty and straightforward sex discrimination. I would go further and say that we can only—only—tackle low wages if we eliminate the sex pay gap, and many of our economic problems would be substantially reduced if we were able to do so. So, I'd like to associate myself with some of the comments that Jane Hutt has made about practical things that the Welsh Government could do. For example, if it announced that it and other public-sector organisations in Wales would only use living wage employers for cleaning, maintenance, hospitality and care, what a signal that would send to those industries, and what a huge impact it would have. So, I hope that the Government will support this motion; our hard-working fellow citizens deserve no less from us. We will not tackle in-work poverty unless we tackle sex discrimination in the workplace, and I believe that there is so much more that we could do.