Equality Bill

First, I want to put on record my support for the Bill, which is a landmark piece of legislation that will help hundreds of thousands of people in the years to come. I want to speak to new clause 33, which I have tabled and would like to put to the vote at the appropriate time. I noted the comments of the hon. Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Lynne Featherstone). It is important that this House debates and divides on the issue of mandatory pay audits, and I believe that my new clause would be the appropriate one to vote on given that it proposes a lower threshold of 21 employees in the workplace. I will come to that a later stage in my speech, which I will try to keep relatively brief given the time constraints on the House. The Equal Pay Act 1970 came into effect in 1975. There has been considerable movement in relation to men's and women's pay since then, but it has been very slow and it has been a struggle. As a result of the equal pay legislation, thousands of women have gone to employment tribunals with equal value and equal pay cases. Those cases have been very difficult to take forward; in many cases, it has taken many years. I was involved in a piece of mass litigation on equal value in the national health service that took eight years, and I know of a case involving women speech therapists—a landmark case—that took 13 years to resolve. At the end of those lengthy periods, the women concerned did not get the full value of compensation that they would have achieved had they won at the employment tribunal. Because they knew that they were going to have to wait for many more years before they got to that stage of the proceedings, they decided to take a proportion of the compensation that they would have been successful in obtaining had the case gone through the whole process. Too many of those involved had retired or died, or their circumstances had otherwise changed, and they took the view that they had to take compensation at that stage instead of pursuing the matter to the bitter end. Equal pay and equal value cases take such a huge amount of time because of the difficulty of taking them through the tribunal and the wide range of technical defences that are available to employers. Cases of this nature place a huge burden on the women who bring them; being the focus of such a case is a very pressurised experience. I therefore support new clause 4 on representative actions. We need to look at the ways that other countries have dealt with these problems. It is clear that taking class actions, or representative actions, is a way of ensuring not only that the onus is not on one individual at the tribunal but that more people benefit when they win. I also support the amendment on hypothetical comparators. That factor applies in many other countries and there have been many employment tribunal decisions about it. I think that it is already lawful in this country, but putting it on to a statutory footing would help to underpin it.