Equality Bill

Yes, you have been promoted. This is an Equality Bill. I suggest that Amendment 64, tabled in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi and Lady Morris of Bolton, is not required, as employment service providers are already within the scope of Clause 60; and that Amendment 65 is not required, as we have no evidence that victimisation is an issue where pre-employment enquiries are concerned. Victimisation is about acting against someone because they have made or supported in some way action under the Bill, but we cannot envisage situations where the fact that they had done so would be revealed in questions asked about health in recruitment. Amendments 66 and 67 would restrict the situations in which a trade organisation may make health-related enquiries when making arrangements for deciding who to offer membership to. We are resisting this amendment because we do not have any evidence to suggest that trade organisations make use of these types of pre-applicant enquiries. In addition, we have no evidence that when they do make these types of enquiries they use the information gained for discriminatory purposes. We therefore believe extending protection in this way is unnecessary. Should noble Lords have evidence to the contrary, it would be useful to have it. Amendments 68, 69 and 136A cover similar territory and have similar objectives to the government amendments that I have moved. I would suggest that the government amendments do the job more thoroughly, if I may put it that way. But there are aspects of Amendment 69 that we do not agree with. We believe that it is unnecessary to legislate to require employers to specify why they are asking disability-related questions, how the information will be used and that there is no requirement to provide the information. We have ensured that the clause restricts opportunities for asking health questions to specified and legitimate circumstances. It is a matter of good practice if an employer wishes to clarify further the reasons why it is seeking the information. We consider that it would be impractical to legislate to require information gained for health questions to be anonymised and kept separate from the application form. For example, small employers with no separate human resources department would not be able to anonymise disability-related information and keep it separate from interviewers. We believe that such a provision might be considered good practice and might be included in guidance and codes of practice on the Bill rather than in the Bill itself. For those reasons, I respectfully request that noble Lords opposite withdraw their amendments, although I understand that there will be further debate on this matter.