Equality Bill

My Lords, I am aware that I am in danger of bowling a googly tonight by what I have to say, because the current legal framework is not without deficiencies, omissions and anomalies. I am also aware that introducing nine major pieces of legislation, 100 statutory instruments and 2,500 pages of guidance over a period of over 40 years is not the best method of achieving a coherent legislative landscape. I can see that, from a lawyer's perspective, the urge to tidy things up must be irresistible, and I am sure some will relish the prospect of a mightily increased case load. The discrimination experienced comes from many different kinds of conditioning, so I trust that you will bear with me if I say that harmony, symmetry, alignment and simplicity are understandable virtues, especially when casting the net so wide and trawling so deep, at least in the public sector. The noble Lord, Lord Morris of Handsworth, touched on some of the things I was about to discuss, so now I will just confine myself to a few words and a few questions. Is what is proposed in the Bill likely to effect better outcomes than the situation today, imperfect as that is? Will the Bill have the necessary bite to give an individual who is the victim of a discriminatory act redress before the civil courts or at a tribunal? Put bluntly, I think not. To give some telling examples, I ask: will it reduce the eight times more likelihood of a black male than a white male being stopped and searched by the police? Will it reduce a black person having a one-in-16 chance of obtaining a job interview compared to a one-in-eight chance for a white person? Will it add to the five students from the Afro-Caribbean community, 80 per cent of whom are aged 24 and under, to this year's intake of 3,000 students at Oxford? If not, how will they get justice? Even in the public sector, which accounts for only 20 per cent of the workforce, will not the public sector equality duty result in public bodies, notably local authorities, generating a mountain of paper testifying to their policy compliance, as they have in the past, but on a scale hitherto unimagined? Engagement will then take place with that other recent creation, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, again established as an act of harmonisation and simplification but already riddled with widely publicised fault lines. The engagement will no doubt be dense and deep, but I would argue that what little change there will be will be incremental rather than fundamental. Rather than discrimination being purged, it will be buried in a maze of management-speak, impenetrable to all but the professional policy staff involved. There are those that would call me a dinosaur, unable to see the brave new world that the Bill will usher in once enacted. My retort is that the new world carries much of the old with it, and disentangling ourselves will not necessarily be achieved just because the Bill is a seamless, streamlined and exhaustive entity. November's report from the schools adjudicator says that more than one in two state schools are breaching the recent supposedly exhaustive admissions regulations designed to prevent a covert selection in their pupil intake. That is instructive of the kind of problems that will be encountered with the Bill and which will be made more difficult to disentangle for the victims. The EHRC will, especially in the current economic climate, simply lack the resources to undertake the level of activity necessary to work across a vastly wider spectrum to secure the kind of step change necessary to shrug off the policy countermeasures deployed, unwittingly or otherwise, to frustrate it in enforcing the legislation. Those discriminated against will simply be forced back into the kind of individualised, adversarial and post-event actions with which many are currently faced. This would result in our being in no better situation than we are today, except that those constituencies aggrieved would be greater in number than at present, with less help to present their grievance. To counter that we must secure, as a minimum, a commitment to include in the Bill the possibility for representative actions to be brought by the EHRC or some other such body, if we are to have a piece of legislation that will work in practice. I know that other Members have spoken on many of the other concerns that I have, so I end by asking the Minister to consider the question that I have posed with her usual courtesy, as it is my belief that we will avoid many of the confrontations that we have experienced on the streets of this country if we consider these matters seriously. If there is no means of the victim getting redress, it will cause this country to go back more than 40 years.