Equality Bill

Amendment 115 would insert the Office of the Qualifications and Examinations Regulator—Ofqual—into Schedule 19, which is the list of public authorities subject to the equality duty. Ofqual, which will be formally established in April and will be the new independent regulator of qualifications and tests in England, must of course be subject to the equality duty. The Government would not contest that. I recognise what the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, said about the comments in the other place by my right honourable friend the Solicitor-General. However, we have since established that we do not need to add Ofqual to Schedule 19 to deliver the desired outcome. The Bill will achieve that without the noble Lord’s amendment. The Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act, which received Royal Assent this autumn, establishes Ofqual as a non-ministerial government department, and government departments, including non-ministerial ones, are already covered in Part 1 of Schedule 19. This means that there is no need to include it as a separate entity within Schedule 19. The noble Lord, Lord Low, suggested that Schedule 19 is practically empty and that the duty covers very few bodies. Schedule 19 as it stands is not the end of the story. At the moment it contains only core generic bodies, such as government departments, local authorities, NHS bodies, educational bodies and the police. We have been clear that we intend to update the schedule with more bodies. Now that we have publicly set out the requirements of the general duty, we want to talk further with other bodies that we think should be included in the schedule. Let me stress that, in broad terms, the duty will cover the same bodies as the current duties and there will be no reduction in coverage. I assure the noble Lord that we are not offering noble Lords a pig in a poke. The two-stage approach is the process that was used to build up the list of bodies subject to the race duty, and we are simply following that precedent. It has allowed us to have informed discussions with those who we propose to list, and we will include them via regulations. There are no inconsistencies, and I hope that this brief explanation will persuade the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.