Temporary and Agency Workers (Equal Treatment) Bill

I am more than happy to deal with the hon. Gentleman's question. During my time with Asda and Wal-Mart, the number of people who were members of a trade union fell. Asda recognises a trade union: the GMB. To the best of my knowledge, it has a good relationship with that union. However, during my time at Asda, fewer and fewer people were joining the union, and the reason why touches on a point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Ribble Valley. From everyone's viewpoint—especially the Government's, who are often praising Asda for its employment practices—Asda is a very good employer. It gives its staff good terms and conditions and allows them flexible working. It makes a point of going out of its way to look after its employees, so people do not feel the need to join a trade union as they do not feel that they are being downtrodden. As my hon. Friend said, successful businesses tend to have two things in common: they look after their staff and they look after their customers. I am not aware of any successful business throughout the world that does not abide by those two principles. Every failed business in the world has two things in common: they did not look after their staff and they did not look after their customers. I have always believed that out of the two, the most important is looking after staff, because companies rely on their staff to look after their customers. If companies are not looking after their staff properly, the likelihood is that they will not be looking after the customers properly. I take no lessons from anyone on the importance of employers looking after their staff. The company that I used to work for made a great point of looking after its staff, which it did probably better than virtually anybody. The result was that fewer people wanted to join a trade union. A large number of Labour Members support the Bill, and more than 150 have signed an early-day motion on the subject. As I understand it—perhaps I will be corrected if I am wrong—the hon. Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston believes that backing the Bill would enable the Government to fulfil their manifesto commitment to enact domestic legislation to ensure the equal treatment of temporary and agency workers. I am delighted to see, first, that so many Labour MPs have come along to stick the boot into their Government, and, secondly, that so many are here to fulfil a manifesto commitment. I very much hope to see the Labour Benches full in a few weeks' time when we debate a referendum on the European treaty. If fulfilling one's manifesto commitments is so important, let us hope that Labour Members demonstrate a great deal of consistency in that. The Government say that they refuse to back the Bill but that they will not oppose it on Second Reading. Their opposition to it is at best lukewarm. They say that they do not want to introduce any measure that could cost British businesses jobs. It strikes me from that that they concede that the Bill, if enacted in its current form, would cost British businesses jobs. I do not understand how on earth any Labour Member could want to sign up to and support a Bill when their own Government have made it abundantly clear that they believe that it would lead to job losses in this country. As we heard, the CBI estimates that the Bill as drafted could lead to 250,000 job losses. Its people are at the chalkface and they know what is going on in their businesses. I have always believed that the people who know best about any particular subject are those who are involved in it every day of their lives, because they see it as it is. It is not us pontificating from a comfy chair about what businesses should or should not be doing to look after their workers that matters; it is the businesses themselves that know what pressures they face, and they say that the Bill could lead to 250,000 job losses. The Minister would not say how many job losses he thought that we would see as a result of the Bill, but it is clear that the Government accept that there would be job losses.