My Lords, I rise to warn the Committee—and I hope that the Minister will accept this warning—of the danger of the enactment of good-heartedness for the sake of it. There is a phrase in the amendment that symbolises that. The amendment that we are discussing with the first one contains the expression,
“protecting individuals from unfair treatment and promoting a fair and more equal society”.
I am all in favour of a fair and more equal society, but I cannot think of anything that is more likely to make people feel that all this stuff is yet again a whole collection of persiflage rather than the serious matter we are talking about. This is not about small businesses; it is not what small businesses are about. It is a perfectly reasonable statement but not something that we should be putting into the Bill. I am surprised that it is in the amendment.
That enables me to say what I really wanted to say, which is that I think this is a good and necessary Bill. However, we have to remember that we also have a commitment to reducing red tape and reducing the appearance of red tape. I want to make a point about the appearance of red tape. Very often people think that something is restrictive or difficult because there is an awful lot of it. I have always believed that we ought to have a law saying that we cannot introduce any new laws unless we take away at least the number of lines from the present laws, so as not to make people feel that they are overwhelmed by what is before them.
This seemed to me to be a reasonable moment, before the Minister rises, to say to the noble Lord opposite that there is a responsibility in setting down amendments so as not to give the impression that we are prepared to load people with a whole lot of things that may be politically correct, nice things to say, or something that might be added to a speech, but which, frankly, make people feel that the Government are constantly after them with all sorts of nebulous thoughts and ideas to which we can all sign up, but which ought to be left to people to decide for themselves as to their purpose. They should not be written down in this way.