Equality Bill

The freshness is because the Government have all along said, although we have not accepted it, that they are consolidating and replicating, rather than narrowing, the legal provisions under which we act. It is important at this point in the debate to revisit two areas. The first is why these questions are of such importance to churches, religious organisations and charitable organisations with a religious ethos. For centuries, religious organisations and churches have employed lay people in senior administrative and pastoral roles. The question that the noble Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, raised from Ellel Ministries is an important one—namely, to check that such organisations would not fall foul of this legislation if they were seeking to employ people necessary for the working of their organisation. That was the fundamental point made by noble Lord, Lord Pilkington. Churches need to be able to appoint members, either of their own particular church or of some other, who are of good standing and whose ways of living and behaving advocate and credibly represent, rather than undermine, the Christian faith and the objectives of the organisation concerned—not, as I have already said in relation to the word "proportionate", cleaners or people doing the books or whatever, but people representing those organisations according to one bullet point or more on their job description. My anxiety is that, notwithstanding a huge amount of work done by the Roman Catholic Church, the Church of England, the Evangelical Alliance and a range of other organisations, we still seem not to be getting across the sheer reality in so many churches. With youth workers, for instance, many a parish in my own diocese employs lay people as part of the paid staff under the leadership of the minister to work with students, families and children. Listening to the noble Baroness just now, I had the vision either of a whole new department of state responsible for vetting all these contracts to see whether these people were a genuine occupational requirement, or of the churches being burdened with endless lawsuits of one kind or another. I have a lay assistant, not a chaplain, who represents me in a whole range of ways; his job description notes that he does so. Is it not entirely reasonable that he should be a Christian of good standing whose life tallies with his Christian profession and who is therefore able to represent me, not someone living in some quite other way so as to make his representation impossible and to undermine my own activity? Churches, religious organisations and charities have senior lay staff, one element of whose responsibility is to represent the convictions, character and vision of their organisations. I was glad that the noble Baroness mentioned some of those. It is a matter of great importance to us. The same is true of the senior staff of the Evangelical Alliance. An English diocese in the Church of England has a diocesan secretary—the head of its diocesan administration—who is almost always lay. It would be impossible for us to work with that woman or man, representing us widely in a whole series of contexts—