Equality Bill

There is plenty of evidence for my argument. I am quite happy to debate the merits or otherwise of the minimum wage with the hon. Gentleman, but given the time that we have available and the number of things that we want to get through, now might not be the most appropriate time to do so. I shall seek him out in the Tea Room and we can pursue this matter further at a later date. The point that I seek to get across with this new clause is that no big business started out as a big business; all big businesses started out as small businesses. I am greatly worried that many of our future potential big businesses are being strangled at birth by the Government, who place upon them burden after burden that might be easy for big companies to adopt but that are much more difficult for small businesses to adopt. The end result is not that such businesses employ men and women equally, but that they employ nobody because they are put out of business by excessive regulation. Let me cite as an example my former employer, Asda, which had more than 140,000 employees by the time I left. Regulations regarding employment and other matters are in many respects meat and drink to an organisation such as Asda, which employs people to deal with and implement them. When so many people work in one place, it is easy to accommodate someone who needs flexible working. I do not worry about big businesses like Asda or Tesco—and my hon. Friend the Member for Weston-super-Mare (John Penrose) mentioned the latter earlier—because, good employers though they are, they are big enough look after themselves to a large extent. My worry about this new clause has to do with what we are doing to help smaller businesses that are just starting out and taking a big risk. We want to encourage them to employ people, but I fear that implementing the provisions of this Bill in full and as they stand will cause more and more employers to do as much as they can not to take on employees. That is because they will be petrified of all the legal implications, requirements, tribunals and so on. It seems perverse to introduce legislation that will do more to deter people from employing staff than it will to encourage them to do so.