Equality Bill

My Lords, we on these Benches, especially in the other place, strongly supported this range of amendments. I know that my colleagues in the other place would wish me to say that now and to pursue the matter. Frankly, I am not going to in the interests of the Bill as a whole. I have warned from the beginning that if we are not careful religion will ruin the Bill. Again and again religious questions will come up. They will take hours and will dwarf the overriding requirement, which is to get the Bill through. So I am not going to do what I should, which is to speak fully in support of the amendments of the noble Baroness, Lady Turner. I just give one cautionary word about faith schools: when the original legislation on this matter was passed, I warned the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, who was then the Minister, that there were serious problems about admission to faith schools—which are not the subject of these amendments—because of a case I successfully argued in Privy Council, the Tengur case, involving the Bishop of Port Louis, Mauritius. A unanimous Privy Council held unanimously that you could have religious quotas, but had to admit pupils on merit. That is not what this amendment is about. Therefore, I fully support the amendment, but I shall not go into any of the arguments. Secondly, I have done something completely idiotic—I failed to move Amendment 105, which had been fully debated and accepted by the Government and dealt with teenage pregnancy in schools. I apologise to the Committee for that. I cannot believe that the procedures of the House are so inflexible that it is not possible for me now to seek to rectify this. If it were not possible—