Speeches by Edwards.

“I thank the Prime Minister for his sincere apology to those who experienced this historical forced adoption scandal, and I pay tribute to those in the Gallery today and those who cannot be here. He has talked a lot about those who need to be heard but who may not have been heard, so my question is about constituents of…”

“The Committee is quite interested in the delicate trade-offs. You spoke about this at the beginning of your introduction, about what the relationship is with China. We would quite like to know whether the Government have come to a position on where this responsibility sits. We have to co-ordinate this type of response …”

“Are there other potential areas where you can see that there are trade-offs? How do you perform that balancing act? How do you make those decisions about what trade-offs you accept or do not accept? Is there a process that you follow to do that?”

“Just picking up on this discussion around procurement, we have talked a little bit about these supply chain chokepoints. You have mentioned raw materials and things like that, but very specifically I have an example from the UK Fashion and Textile Association. One of its members that I have met with, Toray, makes advan…”

“This is going back about 10 years now, but even the police locally did not know what to do. It was the union that transported them in secret and paid for the hotel while the agencies tried to figure out whose responsibility was what. The fact that this is all being brought under one roof is going to be really powerful …”

“You said that was the second, i.e. you have two people who have that role.”

“Just to pick up briefly on that point, the Supply Chain Centre report that you mentioned earlier has fibres as one of those 36 key crunch points, so it makes complete sense. They can produce enough, like many other companies that are represented by the UK Fashion and Textile Association can do this work for us. I would…”

“It might have been.”

“Just picking up this discussion around how to respond to the consultation at the moment and where some of those levels may sit and how we define them, there are workplaces that will use agency workers. Traditionally, and speaking as a former union organiser, some workplaces decided that they would almost exclusively be…”

“It sounds like there is quite a lot of work to be done. It is quite complicated. How do you feel about the level of resourcing and time that officials have to do this? Quite a lot of the evidence that we have heard has been around the difficulties of necessarily feeling sometimes like some of those decisions may be in …”

“Tom, what about from your perspective? I am sure that there will be times where you may be using them. Do you have a different view? Have you put forward some different views currently, or are the industry working on them for the consultation?”

“One of the ratios that we, and I am sure many other unions, would accept in an employer argument might be that 10% of your workforce could be agency to allow for that ebb and flow of business operations. Would you argue that there needed to be a more defined limit put into statute that can say, “You should not be emplo…”

“David, how about your sector? How do you approach this issue around agency workers and the changing view of this consultation on whether they should be included or excluded from certain provisions?”

“You have answered part of what I was going to raise around that balance for employers that are trying to do the right thing versus those who are, as you were saying, working in the grey or the illegal economy, to put it bluntly. I used to be a union organiser. I spent a lot of time outside workplaces, and sometimes ins…”

“Sampson, what about your view? Is there any point at which you can see that there may need to be a slightly different reference period? Is there any other thing that we have spoken about in this session for which there could be an argument that they need to be treated differently?”

“T8. My constituency has been extremely lucky in getting £20 million for Glascote Heath and Stonydelph under the Pride in Place programme, which gives local people the ability to choose how the funding is to be spent. Will there be more rounds of this funding or similar schemes so that local people can be put in charge …”

“These figures were online, but you specifically mentioned 100,000. I am particularly interested in the Vine review scheme that Amazon has created and runs. It is a scheme that incentivises reviews; if you are a seller, it costs £140 to send 11 to 30 items to an Amazon customer. They will post a review and get the item …”

“If you do not have the direct answer, would you be able to write to the Committee afterwards? The important information relates to the number of sellers who participate in that scheme and how much money you are therefore making from it. How many of the consumers on Amazon’s platform are Vine reviewers? There is no offi…”

“This Committee has heard that the cost of detriment to UK consumers is estimated to be around £71 billion. Reviews are a key driver of whether they choose to purchase something—particularly online—and the CMA estimates that £23 billion of consumer spending is influenced by such reviews. That is a lot of money that UK c…”

“That sounds extremely ridiculous, but it is helpful to feed into potential recommendations. Wayne, was there anything that you wanted to add on this point? We have just heard about the powers currently holding these huge marketplaces to account, and the difficulty that we have with boots on the ground from trading stan…”