Equality Bill

The hon. Gentleman will know that positive discrimination of the sort that he proposes has been exercised—and on a huge scale—in Northern Ireland, where there is 50:50 recruitment into the police force. His proposal would safeguard people from discrimination, but sometimes people who get jobs feel that they have got them not on merit but because of positive discrimination. Does he agree that his new clause would protect them from that? Indeed, many Catholic recruits to the Police Service of Northern Ireland have said that they would rather have been chosen purely on merit and not as a result of positive discrimination based on law.