 Good morning and welcome to the 26th meeting in 2022 of the economy and fair work committee. There are no apologies received this morning. Our first item of business is a decision to take agenda item 3 in private. Our member is content to do so. Our next item of business is an evidence session with the fair work convention. The purpose of today's meeting is to provide members with an introduction to the work of the fair work convention and to discuss with them the challenges and opportunities facing businesses and workers. I welcome Mary Alexander and Patricia Finlay, who are co-chairs of the fair work convention and are joined by Helen Martin, who is head of the fair work convention secretariat. As always, I ask members and witnesses to keep their questions and answers short and concise as possible. I invite Mary Alexander to make a short opening statement. The fair work convention brings together employers and unions from across the public, private and third sectors and is supported by academic expertise. We operate in the tradition of social dialogue and therefore have a balanced representation of both employers and trade unions. The convention is a relatively small organisation with 11 members. We receive funding from government and we are supported by a small multidisciplinary secretariat that is based within the Scottish Government, but we are independent of government and our remit is twofold. One is to advise Scottish ministers on fair work and the other is to advocate and promote fair work. Our vision shared with the Scottish Government is that Scotland will be a leading fair work nation by 2025. To this end, the convention has played a leading role in defining fair work through the fair work framework, which was published in 2016. We have drawn on international learning and considered the available evidence in Scotland and across the UK on what works and defined fair work using five dimensions. Those are security, opportunity, fulfilment, respect and effective voice. We also looked at Scotland's progress on fair work and we developed the fair work measurement framework, which was first published in December 2020. We also hoped to publish a refresh of this measurement framework in spring next year. In order to deliver our remit effectively and to have the greatest impact within our current resources, we have developed a work plan that focuses on two main activities. The first is that we seek to build capacity and understanding of fair work across key organisations. This area of work is about supporting organisations who play a key economic development or scrutiny role to build fair work effectively into the work that they do. We have a key focus on organisations such as the Scottish Government, the Enterprise Agencies and Audit Scotland. We also work with employer bodies, unions and organisations such as the CIPD to help to build a wider capacity and understanding of what fair work means and how they can deliver it in their own organisations. Secondly, we use our in-depth inquiry function to look at specific sectors of the economy. We choose sectors where we consider there to be specific fair work challenges. We then bring together employers, employer bodies, unions, workers and relevant public bodies and run a series of thematic meetings, looking at the experience of fair work by the workforce and the barriers that exist in the sector to improving fair work outcomes. We then work with the stakeholders to agree recommendations that will support progress on fair work. By taking this approach, we are able to look at complex issues that may require a range of interventions from a range of actors. We also use our convening function to raise awareness of fair work, issues in the sector concerned and to support all actors to understand the need for change, as well as the specific steps that can then be taken to achieve that. The convention has today completed two sectoral inquiries. The first was into social care, and we published our inquiry report in 2019. The second was into construction and reported in April 2022. We have now launched our third inquiry into hospitality in June this year. The inquiry had its third meeting yesterday and is due to report in spring 2024. Our inquiries are long and in-depth but are widely acknowledged to provide valuable concrete and achievable progress on complex fair work issues that are a consequence of how business models function within sectors. To finish, I thank the committee for the invite here today to discuss the work of the convention and fair work in Scotland. We hope to be able to support the work of the committee going forward, and we hope that the evidence that we provide today will be of value and will help to inform your future work. I begin by asking some questions about progress on fair work. In December 2020, you referred to the report card that was published, in which the convention raised concerns about lack of progress on realising the 2025 vision. In March 2021, the convention warned that unless the Scottish Government took urgent action, the vision would not be realised. Have you seen the urgent action that you were calling for? Are there areas and actions that the Government needs to take forward to make sure that we can reach the 2025 target? Why has progress in some areas been so slow? I defend my call at my other co-chair to respond to that. Thank you. Welcome, Patricia. Would you like to respond to the first questions? Yes, I would do. Thank you very much and thank you for the invitation. Today, apologies for not being able to be with you. A work commitment requires me to be in Glasgow very soon after the committee stops hearing. Part of the answer to your question is that fair work is quite difficult. It is multidimensional. There are no particularly easy sets of measures, although there are good subcomponent measures of fair work. If we were to look at something like the payment of the real living wage, we would say that there has been quite a significant progress in Scotland in trying to improve the number of people who have access to the real living wage. When we look at some other areas that we measure, for example, some of the recommendations that we have made in inquiries or, indeed, some of the measures of things like what constitutes the fulfilling work or who has access to good effective voice mechanisms at work, it is much more difficult to measure those things and we do not see the same level of progress. In the instances that you have talked about, we have encouraged an urgency to try and address some of the areas in which we think that some gains can be made. We appreciate that that is difficult. We appreciate that external circumstances have, in the past few years, made that somewhat more difficult and continue to do so. It is not simply the case that difficult external circumstances can be seen as an obstacle to fair work. We have to think about how we use those circumstances in ways in which we can leverage fair work better, just to give one example that might be helpful. If you look at how much effective voice there is across Scottish workplaces, we see some quite distinctive patterns. We see a relatively well-unionised public sector, and we see a much more low-unionised private sector. It is not impossible that there are voice mechanisms that exist within private sector organisations, but it is generally accepted across the globe that independent trade union representation is the gold standard of effective voice. We saw developments in that during the pandemic. We saw opportunities in responding to the public health emergency and developing things such as guidance on working safely. We saw a development of good effective voice mechanisms. We saw some progress, even in quite difficult times. Sometimes difficulty can act as a catalyst towards improving some of the mechanisms of fair work that we are interested in looking at. There is no single measure. There are a variety of different measures. They do not always move in tandem, so we might see improvements in some, but not in others. We have seen, for example, a rise in the number of people who can access the real living wage or paid the real living wage, but what we have also seen alongside that, along with the rest of the UK, is significantly declining real wages. Trying to push all the levers of fair work on at the same time is challenging. We understand that. We understand the difficulties that Government faces and the difficulties that businesses face, but we strongly believe that the central objective is to be a leading fair work nation, to allow fair work to drive benefit for the people in our labour force, for their families, for their communities and for our wider economy and for society. We still believe that that is a really important objective. The members of the convention who may be introduced all of whom work and deliver their expertise, experience and strong relationships across the fair work ecosystem. Pro Bono, as it were, nobody in the convention is paid the budget that we have, funds our secretariat and a small research budget, but all those people do that because they are fundamentally committed to the objective of being a leading fair work nation in Scotland and to putting in place measures that will show us that even though it is difficult, we are making some progress. We have, at the moment, a plan to have a measurement framework developed that will benchmark Scotland against relevant other countries in terms of their fair work performance, and that will be completed and launched sometime in 2023. Following the 2019 report and following our comments in 2021, we have urged not just Government but other stakeholders, because Government is not the only player here, but Government is an important player. We have urged those stakeholders to try and push forward the cause of fair work, and we hope that we will be able to pick up some of that in our measurement framework in 2023. You have started to address some of the issues that other members will want to pick up on. The 2020 report from December said that the Covid-19 crisis had laid bare much of the unfairness in our economy, and that, even before the pandemic, limited progress is being made in delivering on key fair work indicators. The refreshed plan is due out quite soon—I think it was meant to do autumn, so it is due quite soon. Do you think that the refreshed plan will be able to address some of the existing unfairness that has been added to by the pandemic? Will that be the focus of the plan, or what is likely to be in terms of addressing gaps? Where is the plan going to be focused on? The fair work action plan is the job of the Scottish Government, and it is not the job of the convention. So what would you like to see in that plan when it comes forward? Can I preface that with an answer to the earlier part of your question? We know that fair work practises and the absence of fair work practises are really quite sticky in the Scottish economy and elsewhere, so we know that there are people who tend to get, if they have one element where they do not meet fair work, they tend to have other elements. So if you are low paid, you are much less likely to have a secure contract. If you are low paid and do not have a secured contract, you are much less likely to have access to training and development or access to career progression. There is a bunching effect of fair work dimensions that benefit some workers and do not benefit others. We know that the pandemic exacerbated some of those difficulties, so we know that the people who were worse off in the economy continued to be worse off. We also know, for speaking much more positively, that the people, the businesses and organisations who had invested in good fair work practises found those to be a significant benefit during the pandemic. They allowed them to be agile and flexible to keep their workforce on board while they did things in a very different context. So we know that there are some intractable challenges of fair work and we would like to see the action plan focus on those areas, which are really quite intractable. So specifically the issue of low pay. Low pay is really challenging for fair work. It is very difficult if you have low pay to pick up on other elements of good and fair work and we would like to see that addressed in the sectors where low pay is endemic. We would like to see an emphasis on how Government engage with the employer community to be able to discuss the kinds of business models and approaches that produce fair work on the one hand and work that is less fair on the other hand. So some of the work that is being done by SCDI around business purpose has been helpful in trying to open up a discussion with the employer community about how they can respond to the demands of fair work by adopting a more stakeholder-oriented business purpose. We would like to see much more emphasis around those parts of the labour force that do not have access to sick pay and how we might support some of that development, addressing some of the issues around insecurity in work. We think that there is a really important example and role modelling for the Scottish Government and the public sector to take around broader voice in industrial relations. We know that it is a difficult time for industrial relations, so we know that there are a number of—maybe we will be able to talk to this in her role as a union officer—there is a much higher rate of industrial action now. We know that that is fueled by the cost of living crisis among other things, but we would like to see some creative work around how we get voice and dialogue in Scotland that is effective, and that might be at a sectoral level or at an organisational level. I am going to bring in Graham Simpson, who will be followed by Colin Smyth. Thank you very much, convener. Patricia, if you are answering, could you keep your answers a bit shorter, if that is okay? I will turn to whoever wants to answer this. I have been looking at the website. In my head, I wanted to have a definition of what we mean by fair work, because clearly that could mean different things to different people. You have a definition, which is 76 pages long on your website, so that is quite a lot. How on earth are employers meant to take all that in? My second question is, despite what Patricia has just said, can you tell me what the fair work convention has achieved so far? Any tangible outcomes? I do not know who wants to answer that. Mary, do you want to try that or Helen? If I can just come in and Helen can add to it, you have referred to the lengthy detail around the fair work framework. There is a much shorter version, and the principles say it all. Security, effective voice, opportunity, fulfilment—they are quite obvious about what it means. I am sure that I do not need to go into detail about that. We came up with the five principles after extensive research and international research about what a fair work place looks like. What does it mean to workers? As a trade union official, they chime with me particularly the security and effective voice aspects of them, because effective voice is really important. To your point about what we have achieved, I would point to the sectoral inquiries that we have done. We have done one, as we have said, on social care, which the recommendations were published in 2019. The benefit of those was that we sat round with all stakeholders and done an 18-month inquiry really looking at what are the issues here facing social care workers who are largely 84 per cent women. What are the challenges in that sector? What are the challenges that employers see? We went into great detail around that and came up with five recommendations. The frustration with that is that what came from that was three working groups that looked at those recommendations and how to take those forward. They are still going. However, there has been quite a lot of work done, for example, in terms of conditions in those work streams and what effective voice looks like. We are very positive about those recommendations and about those being taken forward as the Filly review recommended that they should be taken forward. We continue to meet with Government officials on that and influence that. As you know, social care is a very hot topic and we remain a crisis in recruitment and retention. I will jump in there because you are right. You have produced reports. We will come to you, Helen. You produced a recent one on the construction industry, which I have just flicked through. It is very interesting. It raises the issues that many of us have heard many times before. My concern is that it is all fascinating stuff, but what comes as a result of it? You have sat down with people in the construction industry. You have produced a report. How are we going to monitor change? Will that report lead to anything? Are you going to be the driver of change? If you are not, what is the point of it all? I am sorry that I will let Helen come in a minute, but the construction report, again, we sat round with all the stakeholders and really looked at what the challenges are in construction, what is the work experience in there and what can we do to change that. We have met Ivan McKee and set out our recommendations, and we are currently waiting on a response to those. Our job is to advise the Scottish Government, and we have done that on the social care report and the construction report. We will continue to push for those recommendations, which were the outcome of a collaboration with the other bodies. On the specific point on construction, we recognise the need to continue to push the Government to try to adopt the recommendations and others in the sector. We have recommended in the report a recommendation for us to come back and formally review the piece of work in five years as a way of trying to signal the degree to which we are serious about coming back and seeing the progress that is made in this sector. We recognise the need to continue to drive that progress. On some of the specific things, on support for employers, we recognise that the fair work framework is quite a weighted document that sets out all the evidence around fair work, but that is not our main communication with employers. We have a two-minute YouTube video, which I think sums it up quite well, in which I tend to use when I go to speak to employers. We also have a self-assessment tool for employers that is housed with Scottish Enterprise that allows employers to sit down, answer a few questions and get a sense of where they are in terms of fair work and an action plan coming out of that about how they can improve their business. We equally have one for the workforce that they can do a survey for their own workplace and understand how their experience of fair work compares against other people and give them a sense of what they might be able to ask for in their own workplace or how to work together with other employees to make change. We do quite a bit of thinking about how we communicate that out to other stakeholders. Lastly, we have also developed a microsite that is free to use with CIPD Scotland, which sets out specific information by each fair work dimension for employers to use so that they can put specific policies into their workplace that align with the fair work framework. We are continuing to work with partners to try to drive forward, understand and operationalise fair work in the workplace, but it is a fairly slow and complicated process. I would say that employers understand that. It is not a million miles away from what they already do, but it provides them a really good framework for breaking down the experience of work in their workplace and driving it forward. It is a collaborative thing, and it seems to me that there is probably a role for this committee to work—I mean, you are here today, but we can work closely in monitoring this stuff. I have just got one final question, because no other one is in. You mentioned at the start that you received some Government funding. How much is that? It is £500,000 a year, so that pays for all the staffing and also the programme budget. I am going to change order and bring in Jamie Halcro Johnston, as I think his question is relevant to what we have heard so far. Then I will come to Colin Smyth. Thanks very much, convener. Good morning to the panel. If I can direct my questions to you married and if you could perhaps direct them as you see fit. You talked about the care report, which came out in the social care sector report that came out in 2019. You said that it is now at the stage of three working groups. I do not know when those are going to deliver their results, but that will be roughly four years, at least, before they deliver their findings. We respect that it is not a quick process. The questions that I was going to ask was about the outcomes, but we are not there yet. I will look at some of the challenges that the sector continues to face. There have been issues raised by trade unions and workers around the new national care service. Are there any issues or concerns that you have around that and its impact on fair work? Yes. I was here yesterday as a witness from the trade union point of view. In terms of fair work and the social care inquiry, our focus has really been on those recommendations that are in there to be taken forward as part of the national care service, and that is taking a sectoral approach. We have had three working groups that I alluded to. Since the social care report, one of the problems is the very low wages in that sector, and since the report came out, there has been increases so that the social care staff are now on the real living wage. That has been a very welcome development, particularly in the private sector, where there was not that baseline and there were varying rates and zero-hour contracts. There has been progress with the working groups, and they are now looking at terms and conditions in there and on how to create sectoral bargaining, particularly in that sector. I am trying to think what else you had said there. It is really just around, as I say, the impact of the plans around the national care service on fair work. Do you see the impact there? Do you think that it is deliverable? Will it see improvements or could it be a distraction? What are your general thoughts? I think that, in terms of fair work, we need to have the social care inquiry recommendations enacted in the national care service so that everybody is on a level playing field, there is a job evaluation system in place, there is a clear career progression for workers there, and the national care service provides that opportunity. There are a lot of other issues with that. For example, with the proposal to create care boards and transfer staff from local authorities, because that creates a lot of insecurity for staff. If they are too paid across, for example, to the care boards and they may then be too paid somewhere else, there is a great deal of uncertainty there from local authority staff about what will happen to them. So, there are issues around that that are concerning and that we have talked about. What would your role be as an organisation in ensuring that some of those concerns that you have both as the convention but also as a trade union official and other areas of responsibility to some of your members will have? How do you ensure and what are the avenues for ensuring that those are included? It is like everything, it is about communication and being in the stakeholder groups and participating in discussions around it. I know that we have certainly had a number of discussions around that social care inquiry recommendations and trying to take those forward as part of the national care service. I suppose that there are a lot of questions in the last six weeks. Do you have confidence that the national care service, as proposed or maybe as might be delivered, will improve outcomes? I think that there is obviously a framework bill the way it is at the moment. With my trade union hat on, I have a different view from the fair work convention hat on. I think that there has to be a lot more dialogue around it and a lot more understanding about the impacts and working through some of the challenges that are there. At the moment, there are a lot of unclear outcomes and that is never good for anyone. I go back to your December 2020 report. You made five quite specific recommendations around improvements in sectors where performance was poor such as agriculture and fishing improvements for disabled workers, ethnic minorities, women, conditionality and grants access to training and collective bargaining. Patricia touched on some of the progress that has been made and it is primarily around delivering wage, for example. Obviously, the Government has not made a commitment to link grants to the living wage, but that is an area where we have already seen progress. What I am keen to know is that in areas where we have not seen progress yet, what are the specific policy levers that the Scottish Government should use in order to deliver that progress? I do not know who wants to start on that. I think that Patricia is trying to come in, so we will kick off with Patricia. The issue of conditionality in grants, which is something that the convention argued very strongly for in its initial report and has been taken up by the Scottish Government, so in terms of what impact the convention has, we have pushed very heavily for conditionality. The fair work, first conditionality around grants and procurement, is not simply in relation to the real living wage. It is broader than the real living wage, so it asks for actions in a number of key fair work areas. We think that that is quite an important area and an important lever for the Government to try and effect change so that public funding is used to drive and improve fair work. That would be in things like making sure that you have effective voice and ensuring that when you give contracts and grants to organisations in Scotland that they have given evidence in their bids that they have effective voice. That is a really important lever of conditionality, but the Government has other roles. It has roles in its relationship with the employer community. It has roles to encourage and support and facilitate dialogue, and those are all important ways in which Government can help. As we try and do with the inquiries, we need to convene and facilitate people so that they can create solutions that work in context, because fair work does not look the same everywhere. There has been some very interesting progress in terms of—we talked a lot in our report about the need to create sector level for our work processes, and what we meant by that was trying to build on some of the progress that has happened in the pandemic, where employers and unions and the Government have worked closely together to develop the safer workplaces guidance, have worked closely together to respond to the pandemic. We thought that that was a useful way of working. We had spoken to the Government quite a lot about continuing that way of working, and that approach to tackling issues after the pandemic. We have seen now some improvement in the role of industry leadership groups. You are more likely now to see trade union seats on industry leadership groups than you would have been in the past. The construction industry forum, the leadership forum, for example, is a very inclusive organisation that brought together lots of different types of employers. That is a big change in how that sector is working, and that has improved a lot. We have also now seen the creation of industry leadership groups in retail and in hospitality, which is really important. The industry leadership group in retail is committed to producing a fair work agreement, as I said, in NSET. We look to that as good progress in building the building blocks that you need to start to make the sorts of changes that you want to see in sectors. There are sectors that we would like to see more progress in, and they were set out in our report, so we would like to see some focus on agriculture and other sectors where there are issues. However, it is good to see some progress in that space in terms of what is happening in retail with the fair work agreements. It is the beginning of a process, so I think that there is still quite a long way to go before that has tangible impacts on the fair work outcomes that are measurable and on the economy level. Is there anything that you want to add, Mary? Can I come back to that point? Obviously, there is progress around those groups, but on the point earlier about conditionality, what specifically are we saying on conditionality? At the moment, we are moving to a position whereby the living wage will have to be paid for government grants. Long over a year, I remember proposing it as a council of 15 years ago and being told that it was illegal, so we are getting there eventually. We saw a whole host of grants being handed out during Covid, but there was no conditionality at all. There were businesses taking grants to get through the week, but still making people redundant, still handing out zero-hour contracts. What specifics should we be attaching to that conditionality that goes beyond the living wage? Should we be saying that we have to have collective bargaining or move towards that? Should we be saying that we have no zero-hour contracts? We have a lot of levers here in Scotland that we can use when it comes to linking grants, so where do we really think that we should be pushing that particular lever? I think that there are lots of things that we would like to see around conditionality, particularly when we say that effective unions are the effective voice of the workforce and when we drew up the principles and looked at what makes a productive workplace, the research that we have done showed that having that union voice was really fun. That should be linked to a grant. If we hand out a big grant to a company that employs 300 or 400 people, we should be saying that we need collective bargaining in that workplace in return for that grant. What we should be saying is how do you evidence effective voice? That is what is missing. People can, for example in procurement, say that they are a fair work employer and offer some evidence, but we do not really scrutinise the evidence. For us, the trade union voice is the gold standard of effective voice and that is what we want, but it is the lack of scrutiny around effective voice. It is the lack of monitoring when people have grants or are in for a procurement bid. We would want unions to be able to access the workplace and have collective bargaining in there as part of it, but we would also want monitoring in place to demonstrate that whoever is the successful bidder is doing what they say they are doing in terms of a fair workplace. We have looked at the conditionality around contracts. Is there any other policy leavers at our disposal, as a Parliament, as a Scottish Government, that we should be using specific policy changes to drive progress in those five areas where you indicated that there had not been enough progress? Can I just make a general point on conditionality? We have pushed heavily for conditionality. Mary has made the important point that, as well as having conditions, and if you look at the fair work first guidance for the Scottish Government, it talks about investing in workforce development, paying attention to the use of zeroes contracts, addressing the gender pay gap, opposing fire and rehire policies, and instituting family-friendly working. Those are important things that people who spend public money should do, and we should not be using public money to do anything other than that. Mary made a really important point about enforcement, so it is not just about saying that those are the conditions to get those grants, but that enforcement is really important. Who decides whether or not that is being delivered in a contract? Our construction inquiry, which was chaired by Mary and myself, we found evidence that public bodies and the public sector who spend money in a variety of different places—local councils, the NHS and the Scottish Government. The interpret what fair work means quite widely and the weight in which they give to fair work is often quite low. There is a really basic job to be done to say that, as we said in the construction inquiry, you need to make conditionality—fair work conditionality—matter to whether or not you do or do not get a grant or a contract, and you need to make it matter to the way in which you monitor and enforce that contract. It has to be able to make a difference, so conditionality is an important lever. I think that this is an important point. We took advice through the construction inquiry. We took legal advice, because you made a point about whether or not it was legal to institute conditionality. We took extensive legal advice that it was legal, lawful, under the World Trade Organization rules, to say that you had to pay the real living wage. We were also given advice that it would be lawful to say that, in a contract, you had to abide by a currently operating collective agreement. Often that is much more significant than the real living wage. In construction, the real living wage is not really an answer, because the challenges are not at that really low pay level. There are other challenges about insecurity. We are really keen in everything that we do to try and explore how we can push the levers that the Scottish Government currently has. There are a whole series of other things about employment legislation and how we might work with the UK Government to try and deal with some issues there, but we really tried to push as far as possible how the Scottish Government can use conditionality, its support, its facilities and powers, its advice and guidance that it gives, to give employers a whole host of reasons to engage with fair work and to know how to do it. Help them with evidence, practice and support. Help public agencies in how they interact with businesses to build fair work into what they do. Help Skills Development Scotland to do skills in that way to support skills formation in a way that produces fair work. You are right that there is a set of levers that are far wider than conditionality itself, but conditionality is important. Michelle Thomson is to be followed by Gordon MacDonald. Good morning, everybody. I will ask a question of yourself, Mary, and likewise if you want to pass it out. Obviously, we are the fair work committee, but we are also the economy committee, and it is well reported the challenges that we have at the moment, and everyone will watch with interest to see what the UK budget means and what that flows through and the implications for the Scottish Government and the wider economic environment. With that in mind, can you put on the record for us today what you see as the key economic barriers to progress fair work on your key stakeholders, i.e. employers and the Scottish Government? Patricia, would you like to come in on this? We know that there are big challenges out there. We know that there is a cost crisis. We know that there is a staff shortages crisis. We know that there is an industrial relations crisis. There is a lot going on, which makes it very difficult. The convention's position has always been that, in times of adversity, fair work is a good thing for the economy. One of the arguments that we have made from the outset and maybe one that is not being taken up as readily by the Scottish Government or as frequently as we would like, is that we do not think that fair work is a social policy. We do not think that it is, for example, an end set. We do not think that it is simply a poverty reduction strategy, because fair work is aimed at every level of the economy. We actually think that it is how you build a good economy. We think that it is how you build a good, sustainable, robust, flexible, responsive economy. We think that not because it is a good idea, but because there is good evidence to suggest it. Countries across the world with better fair work indicators tend to have innovative and highly performing economies, highly productive economies. We genuinely believe that that is important. I agree with everything that you have said so far, but my question was specifically what assessment have you made in the current climate today of the economic barriers faced by your key stakeholders, i.e. employers and the Scottish Government? I agree with you about fair work being enmeshed in economic choices, but I am asking, given even today, we have talked about sick pay, we have talked about zero contracts, of course that is under employment law. We have not yet touched very much on a gig economy, generally. I am trying to work out what assessment you have made of the blockers and the barriers today from an economic perspective. Mary or yourself, Patricia? For the private review of employees, the biggest issue at the moment is the cost of living crisis. That is very clear. We understand that, for employers, their own cost constraints make it very difficult to deal with that cost of living crisis. In that context, we revert back to how—two things—one is to focus on how you redistribute the current pot to be as fair as possible so that we identify areas where there are real challenges. We have seen a lot of employers across Scotland do that. We have seen a whole host of employers in Scotland make one-off payments to their staff. That is often higher at the bottom end of the income distribution than it is at the top end. We have seen employers try to respond to that and recognise the real difficulties that workers themselves face. We know that the Scottish Government has not got unlimited resources. When Mary talked about social care earlier, we understand that it is a really low-paid sector. It is now really struggling with staff shortages. That is a big economic barrier to institute and fair work. If you simply do not have enough people, the people end up having to do more. We know that that is really challenging, but we think that there are ways in which you can redistribute budgets and money to be able to try to address the worst excesses of that. We have real concerns about the extent of being in work and in poverty in Scotland. 60 per cent of adults in Scotland who live in poverty have a working member of their household. We need to be able to try and find a way of redistributing the resources that we have, albeit limited, to make work pay and to make those difficulties more easy to bear across the board. It is perhaps more of a slightly financed consideration, just as my last point. Within that redistribution, have you looked and come up with suggested ideas of where you would take money from, given that when you are operating with a fixed budget, to give to something means that you need to take it from somewhere else? Have you looked at that from the point of view of Fair Bar, and where would you take it from? We have not looked specifically at that, so it is not our job to advise the Scottish Government on its financial arrangements. One of the things that we did say, and it relates to any of their questions, is that we did make a public statement some weeks ago in relation to the national care service because we were concerned about the lack of a budget line to support the implementation of our social care recommendations. We did make a public statement about the need for that to be funded. My understanding is that there has been a change in the budget line for the national care service, so that some of the money that had been kept to fund the development of the national care service is now going to be spent on front-line wages and social care. We think that that is a very good thing. Gordon MacDonald, to be followed by Colin Beattie. Going back to your December 2020 report, you highlighted a number of sectors that were not performing well against the fair work indicators. We have touched upon the pandemic, but can you say what impact the pandemic has had on those sectors? I know that you have done an inquiry into two or three of them. Patricia, if you can come in on that. We know that the pandemic has made the challenges in social care worse. We know that construction was an interesting one because construction was one of the sectors that needed to get back to work pretty quickly in the pandemic. Across the economy and not just in those sectors, we know that where people had poor conditions beforehand, most of those either stayed the same or got worse during the pandemic. If you did not have access to sick pay, that was much more of a challenge during the pandemic. It tended to be higher paid, more highly-qualified workers who were able to go and work from home. We know that one of the members mentioned the gig economy. We know that precarious and non-standard workers were impacted really heavily during the pandemic. We know that quite a lot of them, even though they were eligible for furlough, were made redundant by their employers. We know that the self-employed fell between quite a lot of the support schemes that were available during the pandemic. All those aspects of precarity were made worse in a particularly uncertain situation. How many of those groups are better or worse off is not something that we can give you detailed or robust evidence on today—that is part of our measurement framework for next year. However, it would be our understanding, from other evidence and information, that the pandemic has not improved the access to things such as sick pay. It has not improved security in the economy. There are labour shortages, and that has lifted up wages in some areas, but that has been impacted by the cost of living crisis at the same time. Those labour shortages are not, for example, pushing up wages in social care particularly, and there are still real challenges of recruitment in social care. It is much easier, probably, to work in a big supermarket than it is to work in social care. It is a demanding job, and you are likely to be paid more in a big supermarket currently, because those employers have raised their wages in the context of skilled shortages. We have no particular reason to believe that things have got better. You have touched on the lack of sick pay, low pay and precarious working. All that relates to employment law and trade union legislation. How much of a barrier to achieving Scotland becoming a fair work nation is the fact that those are reserved to Westminster? It is undoubtedly a barrier. If I think about my day job as a professor at university, we would expect to look in other countries at the whole range of levers that a state has. It can be a role model employer, it can fund in a particular way, it can legislate and regulate to do things that it can to support fair work. We would see that in other contexts, so it is undoubtedly a barrier. We encourage, in certain circumstances, in our role as advising the Scottish Government, representations to be made to the UK Government to support particular practices or indeed to not support particular practices. We have done that in relation to fire and rehire. We have concerns about what will happen with the EU exit sunset legislation clauses. We have real concerns about how changes at a UK level may reduce the protections for workers at the lower end of the labour market in a variety of different ways. That is something that we have an on-going discussion with the Scottish Government about, and we are trying to produce as much evidence and support for retaining protective legislation where possible. That is a real challenge, a real worry for the convention and a real worry for our trade union members in particular. Just my final point, Patricia, you touched upon gender pay gap and living wage. Can you say how Scotland compares with the rest of the UK in terms of the gender pay gap and the number of living wage employers? We know that Scotland has a very high—I think that the Scottish Government put out a report yesterday or the day before—we have a very high number of employees who earn the living wage in Scotland. We also know that the gender pay gap for Scotland is lower than for the rest of the UK. Some members have asked how quickly they can make progress in relation to fair work. If you think about how long we have been working around gender pay equality in Scotland in a variety of different ways, it has taken quite a long time, but we have a lower gender pay gap than the rest of the UK. That is a good thing to celebrate. Back to your questions about leavers. In some of those areas, we need to push our leavers as far as possible. In some areas, we just do not have leavers. Just to add to the point that you are making about the limitations of UK employment law and the reference that Patricia made to the sunset provisions, there are ways that, for example, sectoral bargaining, we can use those leavers that we have and that we have recommended in the social care inquiry report. We can also use procurement in a different way, as well. In the construction inquiry report, we have suggested recommendations to make work fairer, for example, with apprentices' pay, which changed in 2017 when employers used to have to register with federations and apprentices were paid collectively bargain rates. Since that change in 2017, what we found through the inquiry was that apprentices' pay was very patchy to say the least and certainly collectively bargain rates were not applied. We have made recommendations there that would improve pay for apprentices. There are a number of recommendations, but it is also about applying collectively bargain rates. There are a number of ways that we could use, for example, procurement to make things better. We could use sectoral bargaining, as we have done as Helen referred to in the college sector. We have already been talking a little bit about the significance of the increased costs that are being faced by businesses. Energy costs are a big part of that, but there is also the increased material and labour costs. When that happens, it tends to focus people's minds and businesses are focused on survival. The workers are focused on their day-to-day issues as well. What is your view on how difficult that will be to progress the fair work vision? I think that it will make it undoubtedly challenging, but we are about fair work. We are about people, companies and all the players' trade unions talking. The more we do that, the better. I have never known so many industrial disputes as we have just now. We are listening to workers on the ground how difficult it is for them to put food on the table and to manage until payday. They are frequently going, particularly social care workers, to financial institutions or borrowing from families and friends just to try to make ends meet. It is a very difficult position. There is a lot of unfairness in the system. We see daily reports of companies that have made huge profits, yet they are in dispute because they are not offering inflation rises or, in some cases, anywhere near that. I think that it is very difficult, but fair work is about promoting social dialogue and trying to work through things together, as we did in the pandemic. You will always have employers who are not really interested and will continue to pay wages that do not match inflation and are immune to conversations about the impact on workers. Equally, there are a lot of very good employers out there who recognise the problems and will do their best to reward as far as they can and recognise the position that workers are in. As I said, during the pandemic, the discussions, the industry, the leadership groups, there was some very positive stuff that came out of that. What are the issues? For example, PPA, PPE sick pay, we were able to make progress on those issues by sitting down and having a conversation and trying to work through them. Clearly, you have taken on board the issue and you understand the issue and how it impacts on the businesses and the workers. How has it changed or informed your course of action, what you do, your approach? Maybe I can ask Patricia to come in on that. I think that at the moment, we are trying to think very much about where the real pinch points are. I would pick up on Mary's point that there are lots of businesses that are doing very well. They may have increased the cost of energy and materials, but they are making record profits. We need to really focus on those businesses where there are genuine challenges in trying to be able to address fair work issues. We have asked the Scottish Government to focus, and we would like this committee to focus on those people who are being particularly impacted by the cost crisis. That might be specific sectors, but it might also be different types of households. Whether that is households with disabled workers in it, whether they are not as household with them and mainly households with single payers who are overrepresented when it comes to low pay. It is very important at a time like this that the existing inequalities in our labour market are not exacerbated. For the people for whom things were already bad, they do not get worse. There are other ways in which we might try to put a positive spin, because it is a very difficult time. However, we know from evidence around the world, and indeed in the UK and in Scotland, that fair work is really good for businesses' economic performance. We know that it increases people's discretionary effort. We know that it motivates people and that it leads to innovation. There is very good evidence that, if we invest in it, we create better, more efficient mode of innovative productive businesses. There is a very positive side that we can make on fair work. There are different forces at the moment, so there is a skill shortage. If you were a neoclassical economist, you would say that skill shortages are going to drive up wages and make job quality and fair work better. There are other pressures that are encouraging employers to think creatively about how they can deliver better work so that they can attract and retain workers. It seems to us that there is an important piece of work to be done around the ageing workforce. We have an ageing workforce in Scotland. We know that we have talked about the great resignation in public debates. We have talked about quiet quitting. We know that economic inactivity is on the rise. That is a real challenge, because we need people to be at work who have skill shortages. Fair work is one way of trying to get people to stay at work and to make the workplace look somewhere that you can stay when you are a bit older from your own research, when you are an older woman and you have to combine it with a range of care and responsibilities. Fair work is an opportunity for businesses, even in a crisis, to come together and try to create outcomes that everybody can be comfortable with, notwithstanding how difficult some of them are. You have touched on the labour market, which is obviously very tight across almost every sector that we have looked at. Some sectors, the skills and labour gaps are, of course, more acute than others. You have touched a little bit on it, but maybe you could expand a little bit on how fair work will improve recruitment and retention for employers and help to build a bit more resilience in the labour market. That is a very hard one. Maybe I can ask Mary to comment on that. As Patricia said, on improving fair work and recruitment and retention, we need to look at what are the problems. We know that there are a number of issues such as Brexit that are causing the tight labour market. We need to look at the solutions that are there. Sorry that I keep going back to social care, but there is a real crisis. Since we started the inquiry in 2017, things were really bad then. They are very bad now. Everybody is saying that we need to do something urgently here to intervene, and we know what the issues are. It is about tackling those issues and providing solutions. The issues are about low pay, stress, having to do unpaid overtime, zero-hour contracts, lack of training, supervision and support in social care. It is about trying to tackle all those issues. It is the same with our inquiry into construction. We identified the issues there. We have a very big problem in that it is primarily an ageing workforce who—I cannot remember the figures—is an awful lot of people due to retire. When we have net zero commitments in construction, there is no way that we have enough workers to fill that gap. Why? People are not going into construction because it is so precarious. It is not attractive for workers. I mean that there are a lot of issues around it, but I would make the point that it is about trying to understand what the issues are and tackling those issues. A lot is obviously to do with fair work. Fair work is recognised by most companies, but in the present crisis—and I will come back to the issues that we have talked about—where, especially smaller businesses that do not have great deal of resources are focused down simply on survival, how do you get the message across that there is a benefit in fair work for them? They are just trying to pay their bills day by day, trying to get through it. How do you get your message across in that feeling of crisis in the day to day chaos almost of trying to survive? Helen might want to come in, but I would say that, if you look again at the example of the pandemic, we in my role as a trade union official spoke to a lot of employers who phoned up and said, what am I going to do? I am really struggling here. I do not want to have to terminate contracts. Can we sit down and work through this together? There was a lot of collaboration like that, which you never hear about. You only hear bad stories around it, but a lot of employers have really good working relationships with their workers. The workers understand that we are in a difficult position here, but I would rather have my job to see what we can do, whether it is reducing the working week, as happened in a lot of places during the pandemic, or taking other measures. There is a willingness there. We are running a hospitality inquiry at the moment that has just started. Hospitality is really interesting sector in this space, because it is very much in the eye of the storm in quite a number of ways in terms of the cost crisis. It is also in the eye of the storm when it comes to staff shortages. There is a very odd dimension going on between the cost pressures that are happening in other ways on the business and staff shortages. What we are seeing in hospitality is a lot of employers saying that they cannot run at full capacity because they do not have enough staff to open all the days that they might want to open, particularly in pubs and restaurants in places where they can be flexed on and up. What that means is that they are not maximising their business either. In a slightly odd way, the crisis is creating a lot of interest in fair work. It is creating a lot of realisation on the part of some smaller employers who maybe would not have seen that as their core business. They would have seen their core businesses as doing their business, and they would have come along with it. They are now suddenly really interested in how they can improve recruitment and retention. A lot of employers thought that what we will do is that we will up our wages by 50p, and that will sort it out. It did not. The experience in hospitality is that we have seen wages rise and the staff shortages are staying. What is in there is much more complicated about how you organise your shifts, the security that you offer, the hours that you offer, and how perceptions of that sector have developed over the pandemic. We have seen perceptions of hospitality really decline because of the dismissal of workers during Covid. All those things are having a really big impact on that sector, but it is also focusing on the mind of a whole range of employers about how they make a change and all the different things that they might need to look at in order to make that change. It is a difficult moment, for sure, but it is also a moment where we can see an opportunity to make a gain in that wider understanding of fair work. Thank you for your comments so far. I am going to pick up on hospitality in a moment, but I completely agree that you said that fair work is a way of building a good economy. It is not just about poverty reduction, although the contribution there is clear. I think that that is one of the conversations that we probably need to have more about in this. Helen, you are speaking there just about hospitality. I appreciate that the convention's inquiry into hospitality has just begun and is due to report in 2024. Given what we know about the challenges that the sector has faced in the past two and a half years or so, and given that we know that some of the things that Colin and others have addressed, we cannot really wait until spring 2024 for your recommendations and conclusions. What are the kinds of things that we should be doing now to support and promote fair work in the challenging environment, given what we have said about cost crisis, as well? Are there things that we should be looking at? That is a big question. The first thing that I said about the inquiry is that we see it as an intervention in and of itself, so the end report will hopefully provide recommendations that the sector has bought into and will therefore be interested in delivering as a sector. It is an interesting inquiry, it is different from our other ones, in that the lever coming down from the state is not as visible. In social care, there was a commission in the arrangement that you could use to drive out fair work in the future. In construction, 50 per cent of construction is driven by public procurement, so there is a really clear public procurement lever that you can use to drive out fair work. In hospitality, it is very much about convincing the employers that there is a different way of doing things and supporting the sector to do better on its own. One of the features that we are doing in the inquiry is also looking at what levers might exist from the public sector, whether there is tax, licensing or other issues that we could maybe look to incentivise. Primarily, that is about supporting the sector to think differently and to do things differently. We see the inquiry as an intervention. At each meeting, each time, we bring those group of stakeholders together. We are helping them to understand themselves a little bit better and to understand their problems—not that they do not know their problems, they absolutely do—but to give them some space and a lens to look through that might help them to see how they can link some issues together and maybe make some progress across their sector. There is a lot of interest and goodwill from the industry leadership groups to actually do better in this space. There have been efforts made already to do better in this space around the hoteliers chart or around training that was done through the pandemic. What we are seeing is some other issues that could be systematically addressed. For example, a lot of courses will require work experience as part of the course, but one of the things that we discussed yesterday was that that work experience was not necessarily paid or that it was not required to be paid. There are perhaps things there that we can do that shift the culture of how our work is seen within the sector, but it is challenging because the crisis is nigh. We are trying our best to support the sector in real time to think about the issues that it has. That is really interesting. Culturally, there are cultural challenges in that as well. Just in recent discussions with some hospitality employers, one of the things that they said was that they do not see the need for the unions because their staff trust them. Just the culture around what effective voice means. That brings me to a slightly broader question. Are there other sectors or maybe do we need to be thinking about cross-sectoral inquiries or cross-sectoral work on that? There are multiple interpretations and understandings of exactly what fair work is or could be. One of the challenges that we have, particularly with a third sector, for example, is that we know that the Scottish Government can have conditionality and very clear requirements through contracts and funding, but when some of those same workers are also part funded by other funders or have other contractual obligations that do not have those same conditions attached, that puts immense pressure on those organisations that are very often stretched anyway. I am wondering what it is that we should be looking at to be able to get beyond or to ensure that we do not have that kind of two-tier system. If you have a Scottish Government fund or contract, you know that you are getting these conditions and if you are funded by somebody else, who knows? If we do not have the levers of employment law and that kind of thing that we have talked about before, how can we avoid that two-tier system? That is one for Trisha, because she has been doing some specific work on that. Yes, I have indeed. I do not think that I have an answer to your question, because it is an incredibly thorny question. My day job at the university is currently doing some work across the third sector. We are doing a fair work in the third sector survey and an interview programme at the moment. That will be available in the spring. We know that it is a very heterogeneous sector. We know that it is funded by lots of different organisations and bodies. We know that there are real sticky issues between the legal position, which is that conditionality can only apply to the contract that you are funding, so you cannot impose conditionality on other contracts for a better. You cannot say that you are providing half of your workforce work for a Scottish Government or a local authority-funded contract, but you need to pay all of them the real living wage or attract whatever condition. We know that that is not a lawful thing to do currently, which puts those organisations in a really difficult position, which may mean that they either create a two-tier workforce, which is incredibly bad for motivation and engagement, and might expose them to legal liability in terms of equal pay. It might really put them in a position where they have massive risk. On the other hand, that might also mean that some of those organisations might pull out of publicly funded contracts if they cannot meet the conditionality requirements, so either they will not apply or they will not get them. I do not have an answer to that, because the answer to that involves—I suppose that at some level—the best answer that I have is that that needs to be a conversation that the Scottish Government can have with other funding organisations, whether that be other charitable organisations, whether it be the national lottery or so forth. It is only by joining up to do that that you can square the circle of the legal constraints and the organisational reality of that, but I accept the premise of your question, which is that this is an incredibly difficult thorny issue for the third sector at the moment and one that they simply do not know how to deal with. It is not clear how, from a policy level, other than trying to work across funders, you would deal with that, but that is where the Scottish Government's role should be. That is really helpful. You talk about the potential for equal pay claims and other things. We have talked a little bit about gender pay gaps, but we also know that disabled workers, people of colour, face inequalities in the workplace, and that is what we need to do in that space as well. It was you who mentioned that other countries have much clearer or more robust indicators around fair work. I would be interested if you could share some of that with us to give us some indication of the kinds of things that we could be pushing the Scottish Government to look for more directly. I think that there are two parts to the answer to that. One is on the kind of data that we collect internationally, so classically, labour force data. There are some areas in which the UK and Scotland is not that different. It looks different from other countries. If you look, for example, we talk about fulfilling work being important, meaningful fulfilling work that uses your skills and talents. About 42 per cent of people in the UK workforce report that they have no control over their job. That is a much higher figure than compared economies in the Scandinavian countries, in Belgium, in the Netherlands, in Germany. That is an area in which jobs are designed and how management practices operate. That is an area that does not necessarily have a cost to it. In fact, coming back to the discussion about hospitality might have a benefit. It might actually be a benefit if you gave people a bit more control, had a bit more dialogue with them, used the skills and talents that we invest in really heavily in Scotland. We have an incredibly highly educated workforce, but some of that workforce goes into workplaces where those talents and skills are not particularly well utilised. There are some of those areas in which we do not look quite as good as other countries. There is a second part to that, which is more about institutional arrangements. It is the way in which, in other countries, there are better processes for collective voice and dialogue, whether that be through social partnership arrangements in some countries, whether it be through the operation of employer guilds who align up with trade union confederations to discuss skills and to discuss pay rates and all those things. The institutions that shape fair work in other countries are much firmer than they are in Scotland and in the UK, because we are a liberal market economy where a lot of that decision making is left to employers. It is not really engaged in beyond a minimum by the state, and that makes it, without those sorts of institutional arrangements, difficult to effect change. I would say, just to finish, that we have tried in the convention and you will have picked that up from the process of the inquiries, but all of the other work that we do is to create a voluntary version of that so that we do not have institutions that bring employers, policy makers and trade unions together. We have tried to do that through the inquiries, because that is really important. Having that dialogue at sectoral level as well as having that dialogue at a workplace level to get to overcome challenges that you are facing is crucially important. We do not have enough data on that and we do not know where it operates well in Scotland. There will be great arrangements out there, but we saw some of them in the construction inquiry and some of that data we just do not have. On some substantive individual indicators, we do less well, and then in our broader arrangements for dialogue and discussion around the workplace, we do not have those embedded institutions. Professor Finlay, you set out very clearly why fair work is good for business in terms of recruitment, retention but also the issue of productivity that co-collaboration can lead to innovations. That is an interesting aspect for this committee, as is the economy committee as well as the fair work committee. How do you see the fair work convention working with this committee and what are your expectations of this committee? We are very happy to work with you on anything that is relevant. It seems to me that message on the economic value of fair work is a really important one to keep discussing. Maybe for politicians there is a role for this committee, a role in not just discussing fair work with unions where it gets a good reception but having that discussion with employers because we know that employers with certain types of business models expose cost to the rest of society. Often it is the state that picks up that cost through welfare payments or tax credits or any of those things. The role for this committee, the role for politicians, is to do a lot of what we have done in Scotland, which is to have a really important dialogue, be clear that there is a strong and sustainable policy commitment to fair work. That is not unnoticed in the rest of the UK. We are recognised as leading the UK discussion on fair work. We are consulted with by the Welsh fair work agencies. We are consulted with by all the good work charters in England and Wales. We are looked upon as the part of the UK that is taking that further forward. My ask of politicians in general and of this committee is to push the dialogue as far as we can to try to make it a reality. Support the policy levers that we can use so that we can show visible change in progress. Help us to get the data and information that we need to work out where the real pinch points are. I think that that would be very much the role of the committee. Keep the dialogue strong around how fair work, as we say in the framework, is good for business, good for individuals and good for Scotland. Mary Alexander, if I come to you, if fair work, as we say and understand, is good for business and productivity, you mentioned the national strategy for economic transformation, which I took from what you said, took more of a social aspect in relation to fair work. Do you think that that needs strength and to push the economic and productivity aspects of fair work? Is that something that you would like to see a bit more improvement on? Sorry, I am looking at Helen because you have more focus on the insight. The convention is on record and has spoken internally with Government a few times on the high end set that was dealt with in the national strategy for economic transformation. I think that the concern here was that it was a bit of a missed opportunity. It didn't necessarily mean to stream fair work throughout the entire economic strategy, but rather dealt with it within one chapter. I think that there were some concerns about the fact that entrepreneurialism, for example, was dealt with separately as a distinct issue that did not have a fair work dimension. We felt that that was something that obviously could build fair work consistently throughout each element. It was a really good opportunity to help employers, help other agencies in Government to understand why fair work, why the wellbeing economy and why those concepts build upon each other and build into that economic strategy. That was something that we wanted to see done more consistently. It is not to say that there are not good fair work commitments in the end set. There are commitments to increase conditionality and fair work agreements. Those are very welcome. It was more about how that was dealt with in a structural way throughout that strategy. Helen Ewing will be familiar with the fact that during the pandemic there was very rapid work bringing together trade unions, employers and the Government on a sexual basis to try to get the country back to work after lockdown. That was intended to continue in the industry leadership groups to make sure that the creative working that took place would help us to improve a whole range of different economic levers that businesses, Government and trade unions want. Has that happened to your expectation? Yes and no. I think that there has been an effort to continue with the way of working through a degree. I spoke earlier about the creation of new industry leadership groups. I talked about the inclusion of a trade union seat in quite a lot of industry leadership groups, which was very welcome. I think that there is still a bit of a concern from the convention side, and Trisha might want to come in on that, about the balance between the voices. We often see a lot of employer voices on one union. While it is a progress to have the one union, it is not necessarily as strong as it might be in a more codified social dialogue model, but it is a step in the right direction all the same. I think that the thing that we had hoped to see a little bit more was a recognition that that should be a consistent approach, that it should always have those key stakeholders together. Whereas what we have also seen is some more codification of that employer Government kind of discussion without the unions present. There is more structure there than there was previously. While that might be appropriate, that might be helpful in lots of ways. I think that we had hoped to see a more consistent approach and commitment to social dialogue. As a petitioner, I might want to focus on that, but I will give my final question to Trisha. If you are the appropriate person to answer this, we have already touched on procurement in the construction industry and in your construction inquiry. You have touched on what would be legal or not legal. I am not sure how visible that is to everybody, but that might be an issue about how we make that more visible. I suppose that the issue is that, at what point in the process of public procurement for construction do you think that the fair work can legally be embedded? Is it at the point that the grant is given, which is after the contract has been awarded, or is there something that should be done further upstream in the process that would enable better conditionality in that it is about the contract as awarded, which means that everybody is in that bidding for it would be required to comply? I am not sure in the process whether we can have an improvement at what point does fair work come in. It is very early in the process, so it is at the point when contracts are constructed. It is the point when bids are made that you want bidders to be able to outline their fair work commitments in the same way that they currently outline community benefit clauses and some equality issues. We would want that to be outlined at the same time. One of the real challenges in things like construction, a public infrastructure construction project, is that it will last for quite a long time. We will have existing contracts that have already been awarded without that attention to fair work, but we would really want to see an emphasis. We have tried to work, for example, with the procurement community to support them, an emphasis in future contracts to make sure that that is built in from the beginning and in finding inventive and creative mechanisms to make sure that it is actually delivered. There is an issue about whether, given the tier system in construction, there is a main tier contractor who subcontracts and subcontracts and subcontracts. Who becomes responsible for the enforcement of that? How do we make it clear that it is delivered? However, it is early in the process, so it is very clear when people are asked to bid, they know that they are having to bid with fair work in mind. Is that happening across all the public sector bodies that have procurement contracts? No, and not in the same way. There is an awful lot of variation in how fair work is interpreted, what weight it is given, whether it is given any weight at all, what difference that makes to the contract and whether or not it is enforced. That is helpful. That may be an issue that the committee decided to follow up on at some future point. That brings us to the end of the evidence session. I thank all witnesses for coming along this morning and sharing your knowledge and expertise. I will now move the meeting into private session.