Dr. Laura Bambrick:

I will go first on that. I have the figure for the percentage of under 20s, although I do not have it with me because I did not expect us to go down this rabbit hole. I should have expected that. However, we know from the research that minimum wage workers are more likely than the overall workforce to be younger, to be female, to work part time and to be migrant. That is a general point and I will get back to the Deputy with that percentage of the sub-minimum wage rate.

Regarding the point about the pushing up of wages, one of the issues we mentioned was that the two big sectors that are employers of people who are on minimum wage are also the biggest sectors that are seeing the problems with retention and recruitment. If we are not seeing wage increases, we are seeing people following the wages. This started coming out of Covid-19 where people were changing. We have seen a lot of people not just moving, but employers moving sectors. That has sped up now with inflation, so we are seeing people moving into higher paid, more predictable hours and more secure employment. It is a difficulty for these low-paying sectors. Wages and low pay is a real difficulty for these sectors. They have skin in the game to get involved in addressing the wages of their staff. This is therefore inadvertently pushing up the wages in these sectors because of the recruitment and retention difficulties. This is more than the cost of living in the first instance.