Equality Bill

My Lords, at this late hour I cannot muster sufficient disappointment and indignation, as I feel, about this part of the Bill, and I have already said some of what I feel at Second Reading. Using moderate language, it is in my view a complete betrayal of what I expected would be in the Bill on the principle of equal pay for men and women. I can deal swiftly with the amendment that the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Bolton, has just moved. I hope she will forgive me for saying this, but I find the position of Her Majesty’s Opposition incoherent—the Amendment 87, Amendment 89 and Clause 78 stand part attempt to water down the gender pay gap information clause. They seek to remove Clause 78 in its entirety and replace it with a clause that would only require an employer to publish a pay audit if a court or employment tribunal found that they had contravened the provisions of the Act relating to equal pay. In other words, the position of the Official Opposition as I understand it is that they do not like what the Government have put in, pathetic and weak though it is, and instead they want to treat an equal pay audit as a punishment—so that only if you were found, in an individual case, to have broken the law would you suddenly have an equal pay audit inflicted upon you. That is not sensible. For one thing, it is entirely arbitrary. We are dealing with a systemic problem that requires a systemic solution. What is the systemic problem? The systemic problem is that the Equal Pay Act 1970—Barbara Castle’s Act—has proved to be unworkable. I am afraid this is because its procedures, which were amended in Margaret Thatcher’s time to comply with the European Court of Justice judgment, were deliberately intended to be unworkable. It is tortuous, and the judges have said so. Again and again, senior judges and independent experts have called for a radical overhaul of equal pay legislation. The matter we were discussing before was technical: it was simply an attempt to state the equal pay law, as it is, in an accurate way in the Bill. Now we are talking about what can be done, more than a generation after the Equal Pay Act was first enacted, to close the pay gap in a really effective way. When I introduced my own Private Member’s Bill, based on Professor Sir Robert Hepple’s report, we set up a working party which consisted of all the main government departments, the CBI and the TUC. Month after month we sat and negotiated the equal pay audit that was in my Bill. I remember the CBI representative Mr Cridland, for example, was entirely in favour of it. What has happened now is that I am afraid since their inception the present Government have always asked themselves, and answered, one question: what would the employers think about this? It is the wrong question. The right question is how can you achieve equal pay for women, given the history of non-compliance? The reason an equal pay audit is required is not as a punishment. It is because employers in the private and public sectors need to review their pay systems to see whether there is any direct or indirect discrimination, and they need to do so voluntarily, not by way of punishment. Any good employer, I hope, already tends to do that. The question is: what encouragement can the law give? The noble Baroness, Lady Gould, who I am delighted to see is in her place, knows this at least as well as I do, as does the noble Baroness, Lady Turner. At the moment, the law works by encouraging employers to carry out job evaluation schemes. If they carry out a job evaluation scheme measuring the work that men and women do throughout the labour force, and then apply it properly to pay, they can eliminate direct and indirect sex discrimination. The real question is: how can the law best assist in encouraging large and medium-sized employers to do what is needed, which is to eliminate sex discrimination in pay after all these years? I do not suggest that the reason for the pay gap is only sex discrimination—of course that is not the case. Part of the reason has to do with other social factors, which we all know about. There is undoubtedly still persistent and continuing sex discrimination. It seems to have got into the head, not necessarily of the CBI but some of its members, that it is clever to leave the system as it is now. As I read its submissions, the CBI opposes the timid proposals in the Bill. Employers seem to be under the impression that the best thing they can do is leave the present antiquated, tortuous and unworkable system as it is, so that it can simply be soldered up year after year, leaving it to individual litigation. In the old days, before the Government of the noble Baroness, Lady Thatcher, came in, there was at least the Central Arbitration Committee, which was there as a collective mechanism to eliminate sex discrimination from pay agreements. That was abolished. There is now no effective collective mechanism. What the Government are doing is, in heaven’s name, about as modest as one could conceivably think of. I know the reason. It is not because the right honourable Harriet Harman believes this; it is because she has been outmanoeuvred by the business Ministers who, in turn, march with the employers on this issue. We are dealing with the majority of the population, but a highly vulnerable group of women are being exploited as a source of cheap labour. The Government, in Part 1 of the Bill, talk about eliminating socioeconomic disadvantage. If they are serious about that, one of the best ways of eliminating it is to give equal pay to women and men. Clause 78, as it stands, requires the Minister to make regulations about mandatory pay audits. That will only be exercised, as I read it, if there has been insufficient voluntary publication by employers by 2013. That completely unnecessarily delays making the changes that are needed now to address the gender pay gap. Also, the Bill fails to indicate how much detail employers are expected to be required to publish. Instead, that is apparently to be decided after publication of recommendations of the ECHR. The Bill provides no certainty that employers will be required to publish information in sufficient detail to address the gender pay gap. My amendments, which I am speaking to as part of the group, require a Minister to make regulations requiring private sector employers with at least 100 employees in Great Britain to publish information about differences in pay between their male and female employees. The purpose of that is to identify discriminatory differences in pay so as to encourage employers, as I say, to eliminate sex discrimination in pay by knowing—as they should already know—what their pay systems are, whether they have an adverse impact on women and what can be done, through negotiation or otherwise, to address the situation. Many years ago when we had the pay freeze—some who are a bit old like me may remember—there was always an exception made to secure equal pay. Now we are in economically straitened times. I think that we would all agree—I hope we would all agree—that because the country is at the moment in such difficulty, it is no excuse to go on exploiting women as a source of cheap labour. I had wished that the EC Commission would have found the energy some years ago to bring further infringement proceedings against this country for failure to comply properly with the principle. I still hope that it will do so, because I can see no other way—with this Government, or whoever wins the next election—of ending this scandal. I am sorry to use such moderate language. I wish I could find stronger language, but I have to say to the Government that, in my view and that of my party and that of women in general, this does not do.