Equality Bill [HL]

My name is added to the amendment and I will speak also to Amendments Nos.   203, 205 and 207 in my name in this group. I shall   not repeat anything that the noble Baroness, Lady Turner, has said so clearly. I just want to focus on one point, which is the wretched word, ““expedient””. This is an addition to the Bill. In the original Bill before the general election and as presented to the other place, the words ““or expedient”” were not present. In the Bill as re-presented in this House after the election the words, ““or expedient”” were added. I imagine that that must be because belief organisations lobbied very hard and persuaded the powers that be to include them. The good thing about the word, ““necessary””, which has been added by the Government in earlier amendments dealing with education is, as I said at the time, that the concept of necessity imports proportionality. That is a well known concept to our law and means that the means must be proportionate to the aim. The aim must be legitimate, but the means must be reasonably proportionate and necessary to achieve that legitimate aim. The courts interpret that very flexibly. Going by existing case law here and in Strasbourg, courts defer to the specialist expertise or other qualities of the decision-taker—in this case, the faith organisation—and do not seek to substitute their discretion, except where the decision-taker exceeds the discretion allowed by the concept of necessity/proportionality. So that is an entirely flexible standard in which context is everything. The courts have said so in all the great cases since the Human Rights Act came into force. What about adding the words, ““or expedient””? What does that mean? It is what lawyers would call standard-less. There is no standard. ““Or expedient”” simply means, ““It pleases me. I like it. I want to do it.”” It is beyond the scope of any court to review that. If Parliament says, ““Anything goes””, and the courts give effect to the will of Parliament, anything will go. That is what ““or expedient”” means. I defy the Minister to come up with any definition of ““or expedient”” that gives a standard that the courts could interpret. In the bad old days, under the old Official Secrets Act, there were exceptions that used the language of ““expediency”” in the serious areas of national security and official secrecy. But in 1989 the government of the day—they were of a Conservative hue—amended the official secrets legislation and tightened up the test, even in the area of national security and official secrecy, to make it a test of necessity. It is unacceptable that the words ““or expedient”” should be left in the Bill as a standardless justification, a cop-out, allowing faith organisations to discriminate at large, when the Government’s original intention, before the previous general election, was quite rightly that the test should be that of necessity. For those reasons, I hope that the Government will substitute for the words ““or expedient”” either nothing at all or something fairly strict that the courts can interpret and apply.