Fixed-term Employees (Prevention of Less Favourable Treatment) (Amendment) Regulations 2008

My Lords, the point that the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, has just alluded to was very telling: he is, in fact, alone on the Conservative Benches, as I am on these Benches, I fear. I on these Benches support this measure. Agency workers, as the very helpful Explanatory Memorandum makes clear, are a poorly paid and vulnerable group. It points out that on average they earn only £7.80 an hour, compared to an average of £11.47 an hour for other people. A very high proportion of agency workers are recent immigrants; something like 13 per cent of immigrants since 2003, compared to only 2 per cent of the population as a whole, are agency workers. In an increasingly outsourced world, we believe that they must not be treated less favourably than other workers. My honourable friend Lorely Burt in the Commons has worked hard on this issue and has been involved in putting through a lot of legislation to make the situation for agency workers just as fair as that for all workers. We are firmly in favour of this measure. I have one or two questions. I was intrigued to see in the greenhouse gas assessment that there will be a saving to the department of approximately 2,000 reams of paper from the consequential reduction in the use of 63,000 claims forms. Does that mean 2,000 reams a year or once? I cannot remember what a ream is—it is a long time since I was at school. Is that a number of pieces of paper, like a quire? Perhaps the Minister can help me on that.