Living Wage

I can respond to that. The 300 worker figure, I think, refers to figures that came from a survey in September 2008. We did our own questionnaires in July 2009 and understood that around 89% of our workforce is paid the London Living Wage. In order to validate that we carried out an independent survey recently, in September, and randomly surveyed over 1,700 of our current workforce. That has shown now that 95.3% of our workforce is getting the London Living Wage. Of those that did not, the balance, around 1.8% declined to respond and 2.8% declared they were not receiving the London Living Wage. Of course that includes apprentices and some trainees.

So the figure is obviously well under 300 but anyone not receiving the London Living Wage, who should be, is obviously unacceptable. What we have done over the last three and a half years is we have been very supportive of the East London Communities Organisation (TELCO) campaign - TELCO started this programme - so we have worked very closely with TELCO for the last three and a half years and I am sure TELCO would reinforce that.

We have also worked very, very closely with our contractors because it is really important that the contractors embrace this programme and bring it in in a consultative and cooperative way, and they have. In particular, we have targeted those parts of the construction industry which are most prevalent not to pay the London Living Wage; for example the security guarding industry, typically, is an industry that does not necessarily cover the London Living Wage. We have over 400 employees on our site now in the overall guarding contracts, the 24-hour contracts, but we spend a lot of time negotiating with our contractors and suppliers in that area to ensure that everyone was paid the London Living Wage.

So, in summary, we continue to work. It is unacceptable to have anyone that is not getting it that can get it, besides the apprenticeships which are covered by different awards and we continue to work on that. The important thing is cooperation with our workforce and our contractors to achieve that.