Equality Bill

It is for the Government to prove their case. Clearly, the hon. Lady has concerns about the way the Government run the tribunals service, which is not effective. It may be for Ministers in the Ministry of Justice to look at how that is working and how effective it is before she complains about our reasonable and proportionate proposals. On positive action—or positive discrimination, as the Minister perhaps more accurately, albeit inadvertently, called it in her opening remarks—the Bill's proposals seem to allow employers to discriminate in favour of candidates who are not the most qualified for the job. The argument that has been advanced, and is indeed supported by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, concerns the example of a primary school where there are two equally qualified candidates and it was wished to hire one rather than the other because of the diversity of the work force. It seems to me that if those candidates are truly equally qualified, and it genuinely is a tie-break situation, there is nothing in the existing law that would stop that happening. If, however, the Bill allows organisations to go further and have a wholesale choosing of candidates when they are not the most qualified for the job, that would be discrimination. It could give rise to situations such as that which recently occurred in my own county of Gloucestershire when our police force was actively discriminating against white people; that was found to be unlawful, and it had to stop it. That had a very negative effect on diversity and gave fairness and diversity a bad name. We should not be promoting that sort of behaviour, and if that is what the Bill allows, as I fear it does, we should not be in favour of these proposals. Let me turn to disability. The hon. Member for Kingswood (Roger Berry) is right to say that we must recognise that disability discrimination needs to be approached differently. Indeed, that was the conclusion of the Work and Pensions Committee in its report. As he said, in order to create a level playing field and have genuine equality of opportunity, it is often necessary to take positive steps to ensure that disabled people are treated fairly. We are glad that that has been recognised in the Bill and that the Government have responded to the judgment in the Malcolm case, and we will be testing to see how their proposals work in practice. The hon. Gentleman also referred to improvements in disabled people getting into work. I have checked the official figures, and some progress has been made; I pay tribute to the Government for that. In 1999, the employment rate for disabled people stood at 46 per cent., and it has now risen to about 50 per cent. There has been some progress, but there is a considerable way to go. We have come up with some ambitious welfare reform proposals because we want that to go further and faster. The socio-economic part of the Bill—part 1—is the biggest disappointment. No one will disagree that the widening gap between the rich and poor and declining social mobility under this Government need to be addressed. Indeed, a recent study from the London School of Economics showed that in Britain social mobility had declined and that the gap between rich and poor was getting wider. A careful comparison of several countries revealed that the United States and Britain were at the bottom, with the lowest social mobility, but in Britain it was getting worse. Those problems clearly need to be tackled: we cannot just wish them away or legislate them away. The Government thought they had legislated away fuel poverty, but it still exists. They plan to pass a Bill to eliminate child poverty, but last week it rose, yet again, by 100,000. It is going in the wrong direction, and simply passing a Bill will not solve the problem. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead said at the start of the debate, if we are to tackle these problems we need to tackle the root causes—family breakdown, poor education and worklessness. Real action will solve them, such as our proposals to give parents more power and allow good schools to expand and new schools to open where there is demand.