Equality Bill

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lords for tabling this amendment, because it is helpful for the Government to have an opportunity to put on record why we have limited the protection from age discrimination in services and public functions to adults. I rather like the quotation from the noble Lord about Lord Russell. First I should make clear that children and young people do have extensive protection under the Equality Bill. Like adults, they are protected from discrimination because of race, disability, gender, religion and belief, sexual orientation and gender reassignment and, like adults, from harassment because of disability, race and sex. Amendment 57 seeks to extend the ban on age discrimination in the provision of goods and services and the exercise of public functions to people under the age of 18. The Government have been clear from the outset that we are not minded to do this, and the decision not to has been taken only after very careful thought. For adults we can identify only a very few situations where it is appropriate to differentiate services—as we did earlier this evening—according to age. The situation for children, however, is very different. It is almost always right to treat people under the age of 18 in a way that is appropriate to their age and particular stage of development, and it is often appropriate to treat them differently from adults. This is because age is a good indicator of a young person’s level of development and their need for support or protection. It significantly influences how they need to be engaged, the services they require and the levels of personal responsibility and freedoms they should be afforded. For example, three year-olds are very different from 10 year-olds, who in turn are very different from 15 year-olds. It would be nonsensical to require service providers to be age-blind when addressing the needs of children and providing services. There is no easy or sensible way to set arbitrary age limits on what should be appropriate treatment of children of different ages for every type of service that may be provided. Even 16 and 17 year-olds often need to be treated differently from adults. For example, they are restricted from purchasing tobacco products, alcohol, offensive weapons and knives, fireworks and sparklers and so on. The law also limits a child’s responsibility in areas of contract and tort, including their liability for damages and their capacity to enter into contracts for goods and services. We asked for examples of age discrimination to inform the development of policy on several occasions, but most of the examples of poor treatment of young people presented to us—the sort of examples cited by Young Equals—come from negative attitudes towards children, a general low opinion and mistrust of young people, and a lack of age-appropriate services for various age groups. I have had a note passed to me about the various problems mentioned by Young Equals. The Government’s Aiming High for Young People strategy aims to increase young people’s influence over services, improve access to positive activities and counteract the way young people are often seen negatively. We are providing funding for local authorities to improve and involve young people in developing facilities and the Every Child Matters strategy and the Children’s Plan put children at the heart of government policy. We are dealing in different ways with many of the things that Young Equals raise. Outside the various age limits specified in law, there are many age-appropriate and age-restricted services that exist to help young people in their transition to adulthood. These include sexual health screening, teenage pregnancy services, relationship counselling, substance misuse advisory groups, young people’s mental health and wellbeing support services, youth offending schemes and many others. Of course, these are in addition to more general age-related services such as crèches, childminding, play areas and activity centres. By not extending the age discrimination provisions to under-18s, our main concern has never been with the various age limits set out in statute, but with the need to protect the widespread, numerous age-appropriate and age-restricted services provided for young people to support them in their transition to adulthood and to assist them in taking on increasing responsibility for their own lives. It would be extremely complex to provide exceptions in law to protect all such treatment. However, even if we were able to provide such exceptions and an objective justification defence, many service providers would simply standardise services across all age groups or withdraw from providing age-appropriate services altogether out of fear of being tied up in complaints that could end up in court. There would also be a reluctance to commit the management and other resources necessary to ensure that their services are always delivered in an age-blind way, or that the objective justification assessments have been properly carried out to prevent challenge in the first place. It is just not worth the significant risk of compromising children’s services and the widespread, legitimate, common-sense uses of age in this way, in a fruitless attempt to address young people’s general sense that older people do not treat them with enough respect in circumstances that would not fall within the scope of discrimination law anyway. We take such issues seriously, and the view that young people deserve more dignity and respect is one with which I have great sympathy. But there are better ways to tackle the problems that children face, including specific, tailored non-legislative measures for children and young people, existing legislation such as the Human Rights Act and the new equality duty, which is included in the Equality Bill. For this reason, the amendment is unnecessary and therefore I ask that it be withdrawn.