Baroness Sherlock (Lab)

The noble Baroness raises an important point and I pay tribute to her work with the Muslim Women’s Network and with so many in her community. There is a range of support out there and I have seen some good examples. On Employability Day, I spoke to one programme which was doing fantastic work with women from a number of minority communities who were returning to work, or maybe had never been in work, after their children had grown up. They had very particular barriers and the scheme was designed to focus on them. One of our challenges is finding a way to get people not only into work, which is really important, but to develop in work. I am sure the noble Baroness will know this better than I do, but if you look at the distribution of people who are in jobs at national minimum wage or national living wage, there are overwhelmingly more young people and older people, but also Bangladeshi people and Pakistani people are much more likely to be in low-paid jobs. The one thing we know from the evidence is that if you start at a low pay, you stay in low pay—it is very hard to break out of it. One of the challenges in the new system, which we are determined to get right, as we develop the new national jobs and careers service, is: how do we help people, whatever their background, to have the opportunity to get in, but also to get on and have ambitions?