My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Stoneham, and the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, for contributing to this debate. They raised additional questions that were helpful and useful. I hope that further information will be forthcoming from the department into some of the details the Minister was not able to get to in her response.
The Minister ended by saying that she hoped that noble Lords—there is only one—who put down this regret Motion could see their way to providing some measure of agreement that this regulation is a good thing. Of course, we cannot be against additional pay for the lowest paid and we support the Minister on that. However, I sense a slight poverty of ambition behind the regulations and that is why I wanted to put forward a regret Motion for those of us who feel that this is a step in the right direction but only a very small step. It would have been good if we could have got
from the Government more of a sense of an understanding of the need for pay to go up, for sticky areas in the economy to be addressed very vigorously and for the regulations to deal with those who wish to severely underpay—I think that some do go down that route—as well as, to pick up a point that the Minister made in her opening and closing remarks, an understanding that this is not just a right/left issue.
Many commentators—of which the Resolution Foundation, a non-partisan group, is a very good example—absolutely believe that the basis on which we will see recovery in this country is a real commitment to a proper high-wage and well-rewarded economy, in which people are paid for the work they do in growing the economy and making exports and everything else return to a level that we have seen in the past. I do not think that the regulations, as described, get us all the way there. They are a step in the right direction, but I think that this is something that we may wish to return to.
The reason for putting down the amendment—although not the timing, which was in the hands of the Government and not in our hands—was to get these debates up and running, and we have achieved that. With that, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.