Equality Bill [HL]

I agree very much with what my noble friend Lady O’Cathain said. She referred obliquely to the fact that many local authorities are nowadays frightened to send out Christmas cards or put up cribs because people will say that they are proselytising one form of faith, and that that may give offence to others. We are being far too squeamish. Anything that the law does to encourage that, now or in future, is not correct. My noble friend also referred to Barnabas House, which I mentioned. The noble Baroness, Lady Ashton of Upholland, was kind enough to say that she would look into that. There are other cases about Bibles in hotel rooms. My fear is twofold. The first is that, in the case of Barnabas House, the threat was that a grant would be removed. That gives huge power to officials in local authorities to say that a certain organisation will not henceforth have a grant. That is not because officials are being dictatorial, but because they are carrying out what they think is the law. They have a duty to carry out the law as they see it. My fear is that we may so construct the law that officials will feel that they ought to act in such a way. That is wrong. It is also wrong that people should have their religions put in the dock for the following reason. A hotel may put Bibles in a room and a person with extreme views may say, ““This is proselytising and offending me””, and might take the matter to the Equal Opportunities Commission, which then prosecutes that hotel. What is the result? The hotel will say, ““We don’t want to go through all the business and huge expense of going to court and engaging barristers and so on. So we will take the easy way out. We will remove those ‘offending’ Bibles from the hotel rooms””. That would be a huge miscarriage of justice, caused by the existence of such a law. It is our duty to ensure that any new Bill that becomes law should not allow such a possibility whereby people who, rightly, exercise their religious views, suddenly find that they are obliged to close up on them and not allow people to know what those views are, due to a fear of prosecution.