I recommend that the hon. Gentleman read more deeply into the report of the Committee stage. I commend to him the worked example I gave of somebody on a salary of £25,000 who had given long service in local government and who would be affected.
Obviously, the right hon. Member for Witham did not think at the time that these people were fat cats; she thought they should be protected, and we need to understand why that is not happening in the Bill. Why was a lower earnings floor not included, given that the Conservatives promised they would pursue only—again, I quote from their manifesto—the “best paid” workers? Of course, once the election was over, the Government ignored that.
Problems emerged because the consultation was so poorly conducted, as my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell) said. Usually, a full consultation takes 12 weeks; the Government did this consultation over four weeks in the summer—it began on 31 July 2015 and concluded on 27 August. If the Government were serious in their rhetoric that the Bill would affect only the best paid, it
would be very straightforward to include a provision to exclude those on £27,000 or less. In fact, what the Minister for Small Business, Industry and Enterprise said on Second Reading, which was alluded to earlier, was:
“What we do know is that there is a very small number of workers”—
that is the figure she gave—
“in the public sector on about £25,000 who could be caught by this…But those are extremely rare conditions.”—[Official Report, 2 February 2016; Vol. 605, c. 886.]
What we want to know, therefore—I think this is what the hon. Member for Bedford (Richard Fuller) wanted to know—is how rare those conditions are. If they are that rare, why not exempt the lower paid?