Temporary and Agency Workers (Equal Treatment) Bill

My hon. Friend is entirely right. The poor, hard-pressed taxpayer has already paid enough without being expected to cough up even more to fulfil the obligations that the Bill may inflict. Given that so many temporary workers are employed by the Government, they could implement the measures contained in the Bill for their workers anyway. They do not need any law to be passed for them to implement these measures for their own staff, which might well serve as a shining example to other employers. The British Retail Consortium makes it abundantly clear that temporary staff are protected by the national minimum wage, health and safety, discrimination and working time legislation. It feels that there is a perception, particularly among Labour Members, that temporary workers are subject to unsafe conditions, suffer discrimination, are paid badly and work long hours. I have no idea on what basis they make that assumption, but it is clearly one that they make. Agency workers receive the same protection in all those areas, including working hours, pay, discrimination and unsafe conditions, as any other worker. The perception of temporary workers that some Members are seeking to create is simply untrue. Another point that has already been made and which bears repeating is that agency work is often more expensive than direct employment as employers pay the agency a fee that covers the wages and the agency's costs. Therefore, businesses are not using agency staff to save money, but because it suits their needs to do so. We heard a lot about unscrupulous employers, and there are doubtless employers who do not comply with the law, but surely the answer cannot be to pass even more laws for them to ignore. There is always the desire to be seen to be doing something. Whenever the Government are faced with a problem, there are two elements to their solution. The first is that they must be seen to be doing something, and the second is that whatever they do must not offend anybody, so we end up with more and more well-meaning legislation, none of which is ever properly enforced. Surely the Government should be concentrating on enforcing existing legislation, before they think of embarking on new legislation. We come back to the driver for the Government in even considering allowing the Bill to go into Committee and seeing it come into effect in one form or another. As the right hon. Member for Makerfield (Mr. McCartney) said, this is about implementing not necessarily a manifesto obligation, but the Warwick agreement pledges. The Labour party has been reticent about expanding on what that agreement means, but let us be clear what it means. Before the last general election, the trade unions agreed to bail out the financially embarrassed Labour party to the tune of millions and millions of pounds, to help it to fight the election, on the condition that, if it was elected back into government, it would implement an awful lot of legislation that would do huge damage to businesses—on the condition that it would implement all the favourite hobby-horses of the trade union movement. The Bill is about honouring the Warwick agreement. To my mind and I am sure to most of the public's mind, it is a rather grubby agreement, even if we look at it in the best of ways. That is what the Government are indulging in. They are not doing what they think is in the best interests of the country or of protecting people's jobs, or doing what is the fairest thing for all concerned. They are doing something that they were forced to do because they had no money before the last election. They have been forced into doing so to get themselves out of a financial hole. That cannot be any way to set legislation. That is being done under that grubby arrangement. The British Retail Consortium has always made it clear that it wants to ensure that no worker is exploited. I am sure that the Minister will confirm that it has worked with the Government on targeted enforcement of the national minimum wage, for example, as well as other issues involving vulnerable workers, so it is not as if employers such as the British Retail Consortium are trying to protect unscrupulous employers. It has been doing its best with the Government to try to clamp down on unscrupulous employers. It is trying to protect jobs and people's access to the work market.