Chamber and committees

If I came home from work at six o’clock on a Friday to a letter that I needed to respond to and I stuck my letter in a post box at 7 o’clock that night, that letter would not be picked up until tea time on the Monday.

We have talked about the impact on letter post, but are there any plans for parcels? I know that we are talking hypothetically, but you have said that change is needed. What would be the situation with parcel collections? Would there still be six-day collection?

What about convenience stores acting as collection points for returns from shopping catalogues and such things? Would they still get Saturday collections?

Does anyone else want to comment on that?

I have one question that I want to address to Louisa Macdonell. If I picked you up correctly, in an answer to Marie McNair, you highlighted your concern about the devolution of employment law because UK businesses want certainty and uniformity. We are looking today at how to improve the financial situation of low-income families. There is different political make-up in Cardiff, Edinburgh and Westminster. Is it an acceptable consequence of uniformity that more progressive policies will be delayed and take longer to be introduced because we have to move at the pace of the slowest member, which is Westminster?

Thanks very much.

I have a number of questions that I want to ask, but I will start off with the questions that have been assigned to me to ask.

I will come to you first, Marek Zemanik. We have heard this morning that we need flexible working, good job design and a better quality of jobs. We heard last week from the Institute for Public Policy Research Scotland that the only real power that Scotland has is soft power. It is, effectively, just marketing and PR, such as the business pledge, which had a reasonable but not great take-up, bearing in mind that there are 109,000 businesses with one employee or more in Scotland. You said that, in practice, we need good line management. What is the role of the Scottish Government in that? Does it have a role in fostering best practice, bearing in mind that we have already gone down the route of the Scottish business pledge?

That sounds like a mentoring system. You say that it was a pilot. Why was it not continued?

Okay. Before anybody else comes in, I have a couple of questions for Jack Evans. What is needed to ensure that private businesses are fully engaged in policy debates around fair pay and family-friendly working?

I have a slightly different question for Jack Evans. Your organisation, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, was a signatory to a letter in April to Lord Callanan on the implications of the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill. There were a number of parts to that, including the prevention of less favourable treatment of part-time employees and maternity and paternity leave. Will you emphasise what your concerns are?