UK Parliament / Open data

Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill

My Lords, in supporting the amendment, I remind noble Lords that when Section 9(5)(a) first came before the House, it had significant all-party support. I refer noble Lords to a statement by the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, on 11 January 2010, reported in col. 341 of Hansard.

The previous Government sensibly decided that they needed to test the evidence. They commissioned the most reputable body in the country to examine the issue. It came up with a clear statement that there was evidence of discrimination on the basis of caste. I will repeat briefly its summary. The study by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research stated:

“The study identified evidence suggesting caste discrimination and harassment of the type covered by the Equality Act 2010 in relation to … work (bullying, recruitment, promotion, task allocation) … provision of services … and … education (pupil on pupil bullying)”.

There is an important qualifying note that states:

“Pupil on pupil bullying is not directly covered by the Equality Act 2010. However, the actions of a school may be covered where it deals with bullying in a particular way because of a protected characteristic (e.g. race, sex)”.

So the most reputable body in the country for this kind of research produced evidence of discrimination; we should be quite clear about that.

What does this mean in practice? I made a point of interviewing somebody who claimed that he had been discriminated against on the grounds of caste. He had trained in India in the medical field and was extremely well qualified. He came to this country and worked in the NHS. Everything went fine for a year with the man’s job. Then he applied to his supervisor for leave to go home for a family wedding. His supervisor inquired where he lived, and who his family and other contacts were. From that moment, the relationship changed totally. The person in charge clearly felt that this man’s family and caste were beyond the pale. Life was made absolute hell for him. He took his case to the trade union, which said that he had certainly been discriminated against on the grounds of caste but that there was nothing in legislation that would enable it to bring a case on those grounds. He had to leave his job. I am glad to say that he got another job in the NHS which has gone extremely well. This person was extremely well qualified and well balanced. I was absolutely convinced that he had suffered discrimination on the grounds of caste alone.

The main question before the Committee today is: why have the Government delayed on this for two whole years? I can quite understand their initial response that they needed time to think about it, but why two years? There seem to me to be three possible reasons.

The first is a general reluctance to legislate and the realisation that there is a major educational problem to be tackled. Would not the Minister agree that one major tool of education, as we have seen in the issue of race relations, is good law? No one can doubt that the law on discrimination on the grounds of race has had a powerful educational effect. Secondly, people speculate that there is pressure from India. India has very good legislation in theory about that; the problem there is in implementing it in practice. India has good legislation. I see no problem coming from India. On a recent parliamentary visit there myself, I inquired about that but could find no evidence for it. Thirdly, people say that opposition must be coming from some people. Where is that opposition coming from? I must report that there have been increasingly unsatisfactory replies from the Minister in charge of this area. An expression that keeps occurring in letters is,

“those communities potentially most affected … by the introduction of legislative protection against caste discrimination”,

could affect,

“a wide range of Hindu and Sikh communities, not limited to those of any particular caste.

The noble Lord, Lord Avebury, has puzzled over this. We wondered what the implication of this would be for race relations or abolishing apartheid in South Africa. Are we to say that we should not have abolished apartheid in South Africa because other people in the country might be affected by the legislation? That seems absurd.

A letter from the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, was answered by the Minister on 17 May 2012 in which she tried to clarify what was meant by that. After the phrase which I have cited, she said:

“The legislation does indeed refer to ‘caste’ in general, not to any specific caste. Its coverage would therefore be significantly wider than simply an alleged discrimination against the people of the Dalit communities by other, higher-caste Hindus and Sikhs. Against this background, I do not feel it is helpful to partition the debate into ‘victim’ and ‘perpetrator’ communities or to read such meanings into the phrase ‘those communities potentially most affected’”.

Very briefly, there are two points to be made here. First, however widely this might be interpreted, we cannot get away from the fact that there are victims and people who are perpetuating this discrimination. That is a fact. Secondly, even if it does extend more widely, if that discrimination on the grounds of caste, by whatever caste or whatever other caste, offends what is in the 2010 Act—issues of education and the public provision of goods and services—it must still be made illegal. Indeed, it could be interpreted more widely, but if discrimination occurs against another kind of low caste, in Indian terms, rather than the Dalits, we surely ought to try to stop it. I find the answers in those letters increasingly unsatisfactory.

Finally, there is widespread support from other communities. The Equalities and Human Rights Commission has made it clear that it supports the amendment. There is strong support from all the UN bodies. I will not cite them because of shortage of time. We have to set this against the worldwide background. My view is that the discrimination against Dalits is an even worse evil than the worst excesses of apartheid. It is even more humiliating in some ways

and it is occurring on a much wider scale. There are 270 million Dalit people in the world. We know that in this country there are 200,000. We have to set it against that kind of background. Therefore, it is desperately important that we include in our law in this country, and make it quite clear, that discrimination on the grounds of caste is totally unacceptable. That is the view of the whole range of Dalit organisations in this country.

I very much hope that the Government will be able to claim the credit of accepting the amendment which we are putting forward today.

Type
Proceeding contribution
Reference
742 cc87-9GC 
Session
2012-13
Chamber / Committee
House of Lords Grand Committee
Back to top