Employment Bill [HL]

I can, I hope, deal with that very quickly and say something that will satisfy my noble friends. The object is fairness. If I were working on one ferry line to Orkney I would not understand why my mate working on a ferry line to Shetland should be entirely different from me. I think that a meeting, or at least some correspondence between us, to try to get to the bottom of that would be very worth while. If that means that we have to start again from the beginning and start tearing up an understanding of territorial, internal and inland, so be it. I hope we do not have to. I hope that we can achieve some common sense in that. Let us work on that outside this Chamber. That does not mean I am suddenly saying that somebody who spends his entire life on a British-flag ship operating between Auckland and Sydney, and who frankly has no connection with this country at all, should shelter under a piece of legislation for which that was never intended.