Temporary and Agency Workers (Equal Treatment) Bill

My hon. Friend is entirely right, and he is right to raise call centres. In my time at Asda, I spent a number of years supervising the call centre that it ran. Customers used to ring up with complaints about service or the products that they had bought. We used to employ quite a few temporary workers from agencies, and there is a quite a high turnover in call centres. I would like to think that we were a good employer, but by the nature of the people that call centres tend to employ—students or recent graduates—there is bound to be a turnover of staff. As long as they move on to bigger and better things, that is good. If we played our part in giving them the skills that they needed to move on to a better job, that was to everybody's benefit. The point about taking on temporary staff that is not understood in the Bill is that, when we needed someone to do a job at short notice, we as an employer were taking a gamble. When someone takes on a permanent member of staff, they advertise the job and say exactly what qualifications and skills are needed. People then go through an interview process. They are interviewed to see how they would fit into the culture of the organisation and whether they have the skills and experience that are being sought, or any other personal qualities that are wanted. Employers can do tests and all kinds of things to ensure that they get the right person. Once all that has been done, it seems perfectly reasonable that the person would be paid a particular rate to do that particular job. When employers use a temp agency to get staff, however, they do not have those luxuries. They are taking a gamble that the person who walks through the door—