I support my noble friend Lady Lister in her amendment and have added my name to it. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, for her contribution to this debate. This matter seems central to the thrust of this section of the Bill and it seems odd that the logic set out in the original consultation paper and impact assessment has not been brought to a proper resolution within the Bill.
Two issues are clearly at play here. It seems perverse not to permit people who may have a complicated and difficult transition between full-time caring and going to work to do that in chunks of less than a week. Although this has been explained to me by two notable experts, I still do not quite get why it is so difficult to calculate pay in terms of less than a week. I understand the complications of doing it on a shared-parenting basis, because there are two sets of employers and two sets of payments to be looked at and, obviously, the Government are the third person in the room. Even so, when I was last involved in serious payroll work, we had pretty good figures for what it cost to operate in terms of an hour, a day or a week. That came up particularly in relation to strike action. I am sure that the noble Viscount will have been in similar situations, although I am sure that workers in his businesses were never on strike against him. However, when workers go on strike and you have to deduct pay for it, you have work out exactly what it is, otherwise you get into trouble. In the systems that I was operating, we had a clear view of what the cost was at that level. If you can calculate what it costs per hour to employ somebody, you can presumably also make the system flexible enough to allow them to work in less-than-week blocks, which is one of the proposals in the amendment. On part-time leave, all the points have been made and I support them.