Equality Bill

I, too, apologise for not being present at the beginning of the debate. That was because of difficulties that I encountered in travelling to the House today. I am delighted to have been able to catch your eye, Mr. Deputy Speaker. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester, West (Ms Hewitt), who is not here at the moment, said in her excellent speech, hon. Members have received a number of excellent briefings. I want to begin by quoting from the TUC briefing, because it sums up what I think about the Bill:""The TUC welcomes the introduction of a single Equality Bill. It has long campaigned for a single Act to bring together the numerous discrimination laws that have developed over many decades. It also welcomes the fact that the Government has used this opportunity to harmonise upwards and to strengthen protection in some areas"," most notably age and carers. I also want to begin by thanking my right hon. and learned Friend the Minister for Women and Equality and my hon. and learned Friend the Solicitor-General for steering this Bill through to its Second Reading. They have both long championed equalities issues when it was not necessarily fashionable to do so, and all Labour Members owe them a huge debt of gratitude for their excellent legislation, which we now have on the statute book because of their efforts. The Bill is very much about developing Labour's fairness agenda. One of its most important aspects is the new duty on public bodies to consider how to reduce socio-economic inequalities. That is important in two key respects. First, imposing that duty on public bodies and Ministers may ensure that, across government, we get much closer attention to how policies and policy development will reduce socio-economic inequalities. That has been some time in coming. Labour has had an important agenda to tackle inequalities, but we must recognise that we need to do more, in particular to foster the cause of social mobility. I hope that this duty helps us to continue to develop policies to support social mobility. Secondly, the duty will enable all of us in society to have a stronger look at what is happening in local government and other public sector bodies. It has long been my contention that sometimes local government and other bodies have managed to subvert Labour's equality agenda and not implement policies effectively locally. I am truly sorry that the hon. Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Lynne Featherstone) is not present at the moment. She gave a very thoughtful and well-considered speech, and I agreed with a great deal of it. I must say, however, that my own local authority of Durham City had a truly appalling record on tackling inequality. In fact, its policies achieved the opposite end. When the authority in question was in power, by selling off land in some of our most disadvantaged communities and reinvesting the capital gain from that land not in the local villages, but in city centre projects mostly used by the very affluent or upper middle class, it ensured that a transfer of resources did, indeed, take place, but it was from disadvantaged areas to the more advantaged areas. Similarly, the authority did not use the considerable house building that was taking place through planning law to enable it to build more affordable housing. It did exactly the opposite: where possible, it gave planning permission without any requirement to produce any affordable housing either within the development concerned or anywhere else in the city. I therefore want to check with my hon. Friends on the Labour Front Bench that this duty would require local authorities to explain why they wanted to implement policies that would exacerbate inequalities rather than attempt to reduce them.