Clause 1 - Exclusion of candidate selection from 1975 act
Sex Discrimination (Election Candidates) Bill
9:55 am
Mr Andrew Lansley (South Cambridgeshire, Conservative)
Paragraph 35 of the White Paper on the composition of the House of Lords refers to the desirability of representativeness embracing gender, faith and ethnicity. My hon. Friend might, however, be as interested as I am in paragraph 66, which deals with the requirement for the appointments commission to secure the appointment of women. Two points arise from that. First, the White Paper mentions legislation providing for representativeness in appointments to the House of Lords, but not in elections to it, as intended in the Bill. Secondly, it is curious that the White Paper suggests that 30 per cent. of new appointments should be women and 30 per cent. should be men and that we should move towards gender balance over time. Given the imbalance at the moment, the House of Lords will never reach anything approaching gender balance if only 30 per cent. of new appointments are women.