My Lords, on this occasion I speak as myself—I do not think I have to go quite as far as the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner of Margravine, in saying that I speak as myself and not as a Cambridge academic. And I do not have to channel my noble friend Lord Wallace, because he did not give me any briefing notes for these amendments.
The amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Mann, are potentially helpful but I assume that, as with any legislation, the Government are extremely unlikely to say, “That’s a really good amendment. We’ll just take it lock, stock and barrel and put it into the legislation”. That normally does not happen. Even if a Minister agrees in Committee that an amendment might have some validity and value, there is usually a reason why its wording or a particular idea in it would not be quite right. I therefore ask the Minister, in responding to the amendments, to respond instead to the sentiment of what the noble Lord, Lord Mann, is saying.
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What is so important about the noble Lord’s three amendments is that they are asking for clarification and an explanation of how freedom of speech would be guaranteed. If this legislation is necessary—like the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, I am still not wholly persuaded that it is—and if we are going to have this legislation, then the least it could do is explain how the Government intend it to work. An explanation of how these freedoms can be guaranteed would be helpful. Whether that should be in the Bill or in a code of practice, as suggested by the noble Lord,
Lord Grabiner, is something that can be discussed, but if the Minister could elaborate on that then it would be very helpful.
With regard to the other two amendments in this group, as the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, has pointed out, not all women necessarily think the same way. We do not necessarily all agree even on this legislation, and we are not necessarily going to agree on particular amendments. However, on Amendment 69 and the Prevent duty, as an academic, I have wondered whether that duty is necessarily fit for purpose.
I remember debating that in the Chamber when the legislation was passed in the first place and we tried to secure various amendments. As the noble Baroness pointed out, when the Prevent duty started off, a lot of it referred mainly to Islamist extremism, yet in the five years since the legislation was passed, we have seen other terrorist activity coming from the far right. I wonder whether the Minister feels that the Prevent duty is doing quite what is needed and whether certain amendments might not be beneficial in order to allow academic freedom to be expressed, but also whether we should not at some point think about the framing of the Prevent duty.
Lastly, on the amendment about the equality duty, I have some reservations and hesitations about the term “particular regard” in the framing of the amendment. Again, I ask the Minister—who corrected me on Monday when he suggested that I had talked too early about the question of how the proposed legislation links with other duties such as the Equality Act and the Prevent duty—if he could say at this stage how he envisages the different pieces of legislation interacting. Clearly there is a question of how academics or anyone else seeking to implement the proposed legislation will evaluate to what they should give most precedence. Is particular regard to the Equality Act something that is going to override the present legislation, or is this legislation going to take precedence? How should that be evaluated? While universities may have many lawyers, and there are clearly many lawyers in the Grand Committee, the people making the decisions on a day-to-day basis need legislation that is clear, and does not require people to have a whole set of manuals, in order to ensure that we have the academic freedom that everyone is seeking to ensure.