Equality Bill

My Lords, I want to take the opportunity that Amendment 56 provides of probing a line in this legislation about harassment that risks exacerbating an existing concern of very many in the churches. Subsections (2)(a) and (b) of the new clause proposed in Amendment 56 copy exactly the wording in Clause 26(1)(b)(i) and (ii). My concern with the first of those—that B’s dignity may be violated—is the chain of cases we have seen in recent months where Christians, but it could be people of other faiths too, in the context of their work have said "God bless you" or offered to pray for somebody or whatever it may be, not as I understand it insistently or in any normal sense of the word harassingly, but much more because that is to them the most natural outworking of being Christian. There have been a number of cases when their employer—a local authority, or whoever—has jumped on that, hauled them up and in some cases threatened them with suspension or dismissal. In some cases they have been suspended or dismissed. If such insensitive behaviour is repeated again and again against people’s manifest wishes, that could be harassment, but this action by local authorities and other employers is a sign of something that occurs in a number of amendments to the Bill, that is sometimes there in the activities of the Government, and that is certainly in some of the work of the Joint Committee on Human Rights: that if one is a person of faith one can switch on and switch off one’s whole mindset and behaviour. But people of faith who are worth their salt—I guess this is true of Jews, Muslims and many others, as well as Christians—are what they are through and through, like the lettering in a stick of rock. I am concerned that the form of words in subsection (2)(a) of the proposed new clause, which is the same as in Clause 26(1)(b)(i), may exacerbate that set of problems. It is an irrational and ignorant way of behaving by authorities and others. I have an analogous and different anxiety on subsection (2)(b) of the proposed new clause, which reproduces Clause 26(1)(b)(ii). That anxiety is based not in imagination but in situations that I understand have occurred. In a Christian or Jewish care home, for instance, there is a fear that a worker who is not part of the faith of the home could complain. The same applies to a Salvation Army night shelter, for instance, or there might be a cross on the wall in a Roman Catholic care home, or a Jewish symbol in a Jewish care home. There have been instances when a worker has raised the question, as happened recently in Italy in relation to church schools, of whether the fact of—