Mr. Neil McDonnell:

The consultations themselves are good; the issue is that we gather the information and then we do nothing with it. Consultation is not the problem, with one exception I would say. The one significant area of consultation on the issue of the national minimum wage where SMEs are not represented is the Labour Employer Engagement Forum. Ironically, the employers that are represented within this forum have very few workers on the national minimum wage. That is why they did not see this problem coming last year. That is why there was a large kerfuffle over the minimum wage last year when there was a very big movement in it. More generally, the issue is that we have consultations where we get people into a room and we ascertain what the problem is, but then we do not do anything about the problem afterwards. Execution is our failure always. We are great at talking, but our performance in terms of execution is poor.