My Lords, on this occasion, I declare my interest as chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission.
I had a lot of sympathy for the myriad examples put up by the noble Lord, Lord Sikka. In fact, beyond sympathy, to address the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, I had some deep concerns. However, on hearing many of those examples, they were entirely familiar to me. I recall having come across them in the media, if nowhere else.
The point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Newnham, about how this amendment would apply to third parties commissioning research was really significant. All manner of bodies use university academics to do a piece of research for them, including collecting and collating survey evidence and/or other evidence—particularly in the social sciences and humanities, where it is a bigger problem because the boundaries are less clear-cut.
In the past, much of our non-statutory guidance has been based on that kind of research because you seek to find an evidence base for whatever you are saying. We have had complaints about some of the stuff we have said; in fact, my daily joy is opening my parliamentary email and finding complaints addressed to me in that capacity rather than the correct capacity. However, when you look into what people are complaining about, you can find that the survey evidence was perhaps interpreted in a certain way or that the methodology does not stand up today to the contemporary standards that one would wish to use. The noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, rightly raised some of the ambiguities that lie there if this serious and important amendment is taken away and reflected back to us on Report.
The noble Baroness also raised the issue of academic standards. You get a great diversity in institutions as regards the quality of research. If you found that you perhaps ended up having commissioned an institution that did not deliver for you, I would hope that any amendment that we might seek to make would emphasise the fact that you can only take reasonable steps and that where it says in proposed new Section A8(2) that
“providers must not require changes to academic research as a condition for a grant”,
the change does not come at that stage; it might come when you look at the data collection.
An example of data collection in our case is that the majority of the UN conventions that we apply tend to have been written immediately after the Second World War, generally between 1945 and 1960, and they use language that muddies the water. The convention on the elimination of racial discrimination is a good case in point because it refers over and over again to nationality, whereas frequently what we look for in racial discrimination is not necessarily the Polish person suffering race discrimination but potentially the Afro-Caribbean or African or Asian person. You commission the research and then you discover that the dataset does not hold up, because nationality was taken into account by the researchers rather than particular ethnicity; you might have wanted a narrower framework.
I urge the Minister, if he is inclined to take on board the amendment, which is significant and important, to clarify those things for us when we come back to this.