Temporary and Agency Workers (Equal Treatment) Bill

I agree with the Minister and I am grateful for his intervention. Simply because people are migrant workers who have come from another country and have a right to work here, it does not mean that employers have a right to exploit them. I am not certain exactly how the required information about terms and conditions gets out to such people. I suspect that in many cases when people decide to come to the UK to work, they do not visit embassies in post so they would not be able to see the leaflets available there. The Minister makes a good point and I hope that we can get the message out to people that if they are coming to the UK to work, they should pick up the leaflets from the British embassy, read their rights and ensure that they are not exploited when they get here. That applies whether we are talking about the minimum wage or other rules and regulations. My hon. Friend the Member for Shipley spoke of his concern that substantial numbers of people here do not have a good command of the English language, so they may well not know their employment rights in this country. We must do more to make sure that people who have not been able to pick up such leaflets in their own countries at least get some schooling on their rights. Just because someone is a migrant, it does not give people the right to exploit them. I have examined the fears expressed by the IOD and the CBI about what would happen to employment if the Bill were enacted. There is a great fear that jobs will be lost, although we cannot pin down the figure—employers have suggested a figure of 250,000 jobs. Employers also fear a loss of flexibility, which has helped us compared with some of the countries in the European Union, where there is a lack of flexibility or, indeed, competitiveness. I know that we must compete with countries such as China and India, but we will clearly not take on their working practices, which would involve going back 100 years or more. When we compete with such countries, we must do so in the most efficient and effective way. We must maintain the highest standards for people in industry on health and safety and personal rights. We have to operate within the European Union. I am not sure exactly where we are as far as the European Union is concerned on this issue, and I do not know whether the Bill will be superseded by something dreamt up in Brussels. When France takes over the presidency of the European Union, Sarkozy, who is everywhere, will be super active. He will want to make his mark in those six months, and employment rights may be an area that he examines. I would not normally look to France and say, ““Look at its super-efficient industry.”” For a start, it is regularly on strike, which is just one of its bugbears. One reason why Sarkozy was elected was to make its industry more efficient and effective. People voted for the difficult option; they could have elected Ségolène Royal, in which case everything would have carried on as before with France regularly grinding to a halt. People decided to go with Sarkozy in the full knowledge that he would introduce legislation that would impact on industry. France is going in the opposite direction to make its industry more competitive and flexible, because it knows that that is what it needs to do. In the meantime, we will go in a completely different direction—basically, we will export our jobs to France, which is the last thing that we want to do. Many jobs are based in the UK because people think that the environment is competitive. If we were to introduce this legislation, and if France were to become more competitive, we would run the risk of exporting those jobs to France or another European Union country, in which case we would be the loser. Perhaps that is where the CBI has obtained its 250,000 figure.