Equality Bill

My Lords, I will return to the important points made by the noble Lord, Lord Low of Dalston, and the noble Baroness, Lady Wilkins, but I will first respond to the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. I am very worried by what has happened here. I hope the noble Baroness will accept that, from these Benches, we have long wanted to see on the statute book an Equality Bill that codifies, consolidates and simplifies the law. We have said that on many occasions. I recall that it is more than a year since I had the opportunity of speaking from this Dispatch Box on the Equal Pay and Flexible Working Bill when we had not seen it. I pressed the noble Baroness, Lady Vadera, who said, "It’s still in draft but we’re going to publish it as soon as possible". We had to wait several more weeks. It was published in March and on 24 April 2009 had its First Reading. We are now at a point, eight months later, when the Bill has reached the Committee stage in your Lordships’ House, having been through all the stages in the other place. In her Second Reading speech the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster informed us that she would have to disagree with all the concerns that we raised—there were many—about the lack of sufficient time for scrutiny in another place. The worry was that there would not be enough time here. I recall her saying that the Bill had had considerable scrutiny. It was therefore very worrying when we found, last night, that the Government had to table amendments the day before a Committee stage, when we were quite some way through that stage, and give notice of them late in the evening. This is not a surprise; it has happened before. I am further astonished when these amendments claim that they were, ""inadvertently omitted from the original draft of the Bill"." I am going to make several suggestions, but all I ask now is that the Minister will, in the light of these amendments, revise her position that the Bill has had more than enough scrutiny. I do not believe that it has. We are, however, delighted that the omission being rectified has now at least been dealt with. We have made it clear throughout these debates that we support the need for every effort to ensure that inequalities between people with disabilities and non-disabled people are minimised as far as possible. For this reason, I declare firmly that we support the Government’s Amendment 106B, which would strengthen the provisions already contained in the Bill so that disabled people are not put at a disadvantage. To return to the inadvertent omission, I should like to hear a little more about how on earth this happened. It has been my experience that when such omissions occur, they are like an amber light on the Minister’s radar. I used to have the privilege of scrutinising draft Bills. I understand that there were a number of drafts of this Bill and, no doubt, a number of instructions to parliamentary counsel. I am very worried that there may be other provisions in this absolutely critical Bill that have, sadly, been omitted. There is only one way that we can resolve this now. I am prepared to make this offer to the noble Baroness: if all the original drafts could be placed in the Library of the House, with the instructions to parliamentary counsel that were submitted, I will personally go through all those drafts to ensure that another mistake has not been made somewhere. We do not have much more time to get the Bill right. The one thing we can be sure of is that we will not get another opportunity in the immediate future, because it has taken so long for the Bill to reach us. I think it was first in the party opposite’s manifesto in 2005, and we have had to wait so long. The Minister seems unashamed. Surely we can rely on Ministers carefully to scrutinise drafts to make sure that nothing has gone wrong. I do not want to say any more but I make that offer. I care so deeply, having wanted a Bill such as this for some considerable time, that I will do everything I can to make sure it is right. As I have said all along, I want above all to see a simple, easy-to-understand Bill so that everybody knows where they stand. One of the problems I share with the noble Lord, Lord Lester of Herne Hill, is that we are both practising—he at the Bar and me as a solicitor. We know that this whole area is slightly uncertain at the moment. People have to see a lawyer to know exactly where they stand. Although I suppose that this is in my interest—