My Lords, very briefly, I support my noble friend. In a sense, we have already had two debates on the employment practices of providers that are contracted by the local authority. The first
was on Clause 5, regarding the local authority’s market-making role. We have also discussed under Clause 80 whether the Government, through regulations, will ensure that the CQC’s oversight of local authorities’ commissioning will be treated as a major priority.
The challenge for us on Report will be to deal with this issue by bringing it all together. There is no doubt that there is real concern about the employment practices of a number of companies that work in the adult social care sector and the lack of monitoring by local authorities in their commissioning. One way or another, the Bill will be very much enhanced if we can get to grips with this problem of poor employment practice. I have no doubt whatever that the general use of zero-hours contracts and the fact that those workers who are often low-paid have to pay the cost of travel themselves and are not paid for the time they take to travel from client to client leads inevitably to an impact on the quality of care, however worthy those people are. We will have a great opportunity on Report to do something about it and we will do so.