Equality Bill

My Lords, all the amendments in my name in this group are on the same small and specific point. They seek to extend the protection for married people and civil partners to single, widowed or divorced people who may experience discrimination on grounds of their marital status, and they apply only where the discrimination is in the field of employment. I am a strong supporter of the Bill. I want to see it further improved and on the statute book as soon as possible. I am very sorry that I was unable to be present at Second Reading to flag up my concerns on this point but I believe that my amendments are simple and straightforward. They are, I believe, entirely compatible with both the strategy and the spirit of the Bill, and I do not believe that any undue delay would result if the Government were to take them on board. The intention of the Bill is to harmonise protection and, where appropriate, to strengthen and extend protection in certain circumstances. My amendments would do exactly that by remedying one of the defects in the original Sex Discrimination Act 1975. The amendments are supported by Liberty and, in principle, by the Discrimination Law Association. As it stands, the Bill continues the status quo and makes it unlawful to discriminate in the field of employment against married people because they are married. The Bill also, rightly in my view, extends this protection to those in a civil partnership. I cannot see any good reason why it is—and without my amendments would remain—lawful for employers or prospective employers to discriminate against single people on grounds of their marital status. For example, it is, and would remain, lawful for an employer to offer relocation expenses only to married employees, to turn down a divorced person for a job simply because he or she is divorced, or to say that single employees are not entitled to the same compassionate leave as married employees. There were many cases just like these when the Sex Discrimination Act first came into force. However, I do not have a long list of current cases and examples to quote. I do not claim for a moment that this is the type of discrimination which is most often experienced or most contentious, or which causes the most hardship or makes the most headlines, but in my opinion this should not mean that the basic principles are discarded. After all, these days marriage discrimination is not exactly rife either. When the Government consulted on what the Bill should contain, they canvassed views on whether the protection for married people should be dropped from discrimination law altogether on the grounds that it did not really exist any more. If we were having this debate several decades ago, we would be looking at a situation in which women would automatically lose their jobs as nurses, teachers or civil servants the minute they got married, but that is a thing of the past. However, my understanding is that the responses to the consultation were divided as to whether it would now be right to ditch the protection for married people, so the Government decided to keep it in just in case its absence sent out the wrong signal and perhaps had the unintended consequence of reviving this undesirable behaviour. My argument is simply that, if there is a case for preserving the protection for married people on a just-in-case basis, it must surely follow that, even if wider forms of marital status discrimination are not common, people should still have equal principled protection under the law just in case. I have not been overambitious in my amendments. I have confined them to the employment provisions of the Bill in order to be as pragmatic as possible. In principle, of course, I should have liked to see marital status discrimination also outlawed in the areas of goods, facilities and services for married and single people alike. It is still lawful, for example, for a landlord to refuse a tenancy to a single parent because of her marital status, but in the interests of expediency I have limited myself just to the provisions where married people already have protection but single people do not. That is just in employment. I have also tried to make the terminology as helpful as possible by using "unmarried" rather than "single" in my amendments to avoid any possible ambiguity over "single" when it refers to number rather than status. In case noble Lords might be concerned that protecting unmarried, widowed or divorced people from discrimination would open the floodgates to unintended consequences for the tax, pensions or benefits systems, I emphasise that we are talking only about the way in which employers treat their existing or prospective employees, and no wider. These amendments are no Trojan horse. Many employers in all sectors have detailed written policies on equal opportunities and non-discrimination. They list all the grounds on which they will not discriminate, such as race, sex, sexual orientation, age, ethnicity and so on. The list invariably includes "marital status", not "marriage". I decided to do a quick spot check of the policy statements of three random employers in the private, voluntary and public sectors. In the private sector, I checked Marks & Spencer, whose policy uses "marital" or "civil partner status". In the voluntary sector, Oxfam uses "marital or family status". In the public sector, I looked at the policy that governs the employment of people who work here in your Lordships’ House, or indeed anywhere in Parliament and the Civil Service. Yes, the phrase used is "marital status", not marriage and not just for married people, but fair, non-discriminatory treatment for everyone whatever their marital status. Why should the law lag behind common practice, indeed best practice? How can we be content with terms and conditions for people working in the service of this House to be one thing but legislate for inferior standards for everybody else? The amendments are not anti-marriage; they are pro-consistency. They are reasonable, small and logical. I dare say that the drafting could be improved. The noble Baroness, Lady Afshar, who kindly added her name to the amendments in support, unfortunately could not be here today. Several other noble Lords have approached me to signal their support but they could not attend or stay here tonight. I appeal to the Government to think again about making this small adjustment which would send out a signal about a big principle. I beg to move.