It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship for the first time, Miss Begg.

No amendments have been tabled to the Bill, apart from the amendment involving privilege that I shall deal with when we discuss clause 2. This small Bill was debated extensively on Second Reading, but I shall briefly explain the background.

We created a network throughout the United Kingdom of 12 enforcement teams operated by the Inland Revenue to investigate and identify non-compliance with the national minimum wage. For three years, the teams issued enforcement notices that required employers to pay the minimum wage in future, or make good arrears of the minimum wage, or both. In August 2002, the Employment Appeal Tribunal ruled in the case of Inland Revenue v. Bebb Travel plc that officers could only issue enforcement notices requiring the employer to pay the minimum wage in respect of current and future pay periods, or in respect of current, future and past pay periods.

That ruling means that enforcement officers cannot currently issue notices in respect of arrears for past periods alone, so we cannot cover arrears owed to former workers. The Government are determined to restore the position to what we believed it to be before the Bebb decision, hence the Bill. There was broad consensus throughout the House on Second Reading and I hope that that will continue today.

Clause 1 deals with the power of enforcement officers to serve enforcement notices on employers for the recovery of the national minimum wage. It inserts a new subsection (2A) after section 19(2) of the

National Minimum Wage Act 1998. That will allow an enforcement officer to serve an enforcement notice on an employer, imposing a requirement on him to pay a worker who has at any time qualified for the minimum wage arrears of pay in respect of one or more past pay reference periods. He will be able to serve such a notice whether or not he imposes, or might impose, a requirement on the employer to pay the worker the minimum wage in future.

It will not matter if the worker no longer qualifies to be paid the minimum wage by that employer—because, for example, he is no longer employed by that employer. The notice can relate to that worker alone, or, by virtue of section 19(3), to a number of workers. The same notice can therefore deal with a combination of past or future periods and past or current employees.

Enforcement officers will be able to issue notices by virtue of new subsection (2A) for pay reference periods that ended before the passage of the provision. However, workers are already entitled under the National Minimum Wage Act 1998 to bring claims in respect of such periods. The Bill will not give workers an entitlement to minimum wage arrears that they did not previously have.

The amendments made by the Bill to the 1998 Act will also have effect in the application of the Act to enforcement of the agricultural national minimum wage.

New subsection (2B) states that enforcement notices will only be able to extend back for a period of not more than six years, starting from the date of the service of the notice. The key issue is the fulfilment of the Government's policy of restoring the position to what we believed it to be before the Bebb decision. All sides desire clarity and consistency and this new subsection makes it clear that the Revenue has the right to go back for more than three years, but does not have the right to go back further than six years. That provision will give the Revenue greater flexibility and conserve and focus resources, but reassure the business sector that action by enforcement officers cannot extend back over an infinite period.