My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for his reply and I am grateful to all those who have spoken, especially to the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Wirral, who I thought went out of his way to suggest ways in which there might be a meeting of minds between the proposers of the amendment and the Government. I am sorry that the Minister is not prepared to respond more flexibly to the invitation from the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, to be flexible, which I am afraid does not give us a lot of room for flexibility on our part, although we might well have shown it had the Minister agreed to accede to the suggestion made by the noble Lord to make time for a further look at the amendment.
The Minister said that this is intended to be only a light-touch measure. I cannot see how more light touch it could possibly be. He gave us the statistics showing that there were 1 million tribunal cases over the period he referred to, of which 100,000 were discrimination cases. Some 3,000 of those cases were successful, and in only 40 cases were wider recommendations made. It is hard to see how this could be more light touch than that. You cannot say that the tribunals have been abusing this power.
The Minister went on to suggest that there is no need for such a power by dismissing as immaterial or unimportant the sort of cases in which it has been
used. He said that it had been used in minor cases such as the failure of a company to train a manager. Well, I am not sure how much less minor it is possible to be than failing to train your managers properly. He also suggested that our amendment would make the situation worse. I cannot see that because it seeks simply to reinstate the position as arrived at in the Equality Act. It does not seek to be more draconian than that or more burdensome on employers. I think I showed in moving the amendment that it is hard to argue how the use of this power, as it has been used, constitutes a burden on business and employers.
No one in the House or even in the country is more expert on these matters than the noble Lord, Lord Lester, and I am sure that we are all extremely sorry that he is not able to be present today to give us the benefit of his wisdom. However, I am perfectly sure that he would not be moving an amendment of this kind if he did not think that it was a useful component of discrimination law and the light-touch enforcement thereof. In crafting it, the noble Lord sought to be compromising and to move a less drastic amendment than the complete removal of the clause as was attempted in Committee. This is a different approach. It is perfectly open to the House to support the amendment. It is not constrained in that matter by the discussions that took place in Committee. For all these reasons, I want to test the opinion of the House.