Equality Bill

That is not the point, as I and others see it. It seems precisely that, just as the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, noted, this language of "exists" threatens to narrow rather than to replicate the existing law and threatens to lead us, because there are people who want to bring cases against churches to test all this out, into defending an utterly unnecessary series of legal actions. We are as aware of the question of proportionality as anyone else is and we know the background law. That is my response. My anxiety is that the kind of things that I have been speaking of make paragraph 2(8), as we have been saying for months, simply an unrealistic nonsense. The situation is little improved by government Amendment 99A. The Government are quoted in paragraphs 175 and 176 of the Joint Committee on Human Rights scrutiny report as saying that they are confident that they understand the legitimate needs of the churches in this matter, but their own amendment undermines that still further. It is for that reason that I ask the Committee to support Amendments 98 and 99.