Equality Bill

My Lords, I wish to address the impact that the Bill will have on the professions of law and medicine and in particular the position of women and ethnic minorities in those professions. By virtue of Schedule 19, the NHS is a public authority for the purposes of Clause 145 and therefore it will have a duty to advance equality of opportunity between men and women, a subject in which I have a special interest. I chaired for a year a Department of Health committee which produced a report this October entitled Women Doctors: Making a Difference. This initiative arose because of two factors relating to equality. One is that the majority of students starting to study medicine is now and has for some time been female. The other is the need to retain and use to the full the value of the medical workforce, given the expense of training and the cut in hours imposed by the European working time directive, which has made full utilisation harder. Both men and women medical students need and deserve to have a work-life balance, but the profession of medicine is exceptional in the demands it makes of doctors, especially women. Other professions have long hours, anti-social hours and a demand for continuity on the part of the person receiving the services, but in none is it as intense as in medicine. There have been many reports into the best way to keep women doctors in and at the top of the profession. My report was different in two respects. It focused on remedies, not reasons, as the ground had been well covered, and its thrust was to get women back to full-time work, assuming they want it, while admitting that there will always be periods in the woman doctor's life when she has to train or work less than full time, because of child or elder care. So we focused on returning and retaining; we examined the difficulty women doctors seem to experience in getting into leadership positions, focusing on fair nominations to committees, mentoring and the need to share the limelight in the royal colleges and journals. We looked at flexibility in terms of hours and place in order to facilitate it and we spent a great deal of time examining childcare. There is one big gap in the otherwise admirable ideology underlying this Bill, and it relates to the position of women, the protected characteristic of the female sex. While in relation to other protected characteristics, such as race, the law seeks to remove barriers, in the case of women and the disabled it may be more subtle: making reasonable adjustments. It is not sufficient to say to women that they are free to get on with it, any more than it is to the disabled. The ramp, or helping hand, has to be put in place. In the case of women, that is childcare. There will never be true equality in the workplace until there is national, affordable, indeed subsidised childcare in all its varieties. We expect women at one and the same time to occupy half of all top positions, to earn the same salaries as men and yet to be good mothers. It is regarded as a valid life choice to abandon work and stay at home once children are born, with all the risks that that choice entails if the male partner leaves the home, or the career ladder is left behind. The only way to square the circle in medicine and other demanding professions is to enable the woman both to be a good mother and a good professional in relation to her patients by enabling childcare. When a typical man goes to work, he is provided with a secretary and a computer; when a self-employed man entertains potential clients, he gets tax relief. A typical working mother would like and has more need of a child carer and tax relief on that. The childcare costs that she incurs at work are necessarily so incurred. The tax that it is proposed should be recovered from bankers would be well spent on extending childcare vouchers. A parliamentary staffing allowance for MPs, if it continues to exist, is as validly spent, if not more so, on a child carer than on a secretary, and many women would support me in saying that the childcare is the more essential. Promoting equality without the infrastructure is only half the battle. I now turn to law, where I declare an interest as chair of the Bar Standards Board regulating barristers. I was dismayed to see Clause 45, which singles out the Bar, with one or two others, for special treatment in the area of equality. There is no need for Clause 45. The Bar put together an equality and diversity code as far back as 1995. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Neuberger, issued a famous report on equality and access at the Bar, which laid out a blueprint which has been faithfully followed to encourage diversity and inclusion within the legal profession. Considerable work has been done by the Bar in relation to school visits and in engaging students at all universities. The Inns of Court spend £4 million in supporting students, and as far as pupillage goes, 23 per cent of new pupils are from black and other ethnic minority backgrounds. There is no case for singling out the Bar. The only problem with the legal profession is the Government. Their desire—