Clause 27 - Conciliation
Equality Bill [Lords]
1:00 pm
Meg Munn (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Department of Trade and Industry; Sheffield, Heeley, Labour)
I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention and refer her back to what I was saying: the commission will be in a position to promote good practice in relation to human rights, and part of that good practice is that public authorities should have complaints procedures and so on. As I said, many organisations are required to do so under legislation. My background is in social services, so I am aware that the Children Act 1989 brought in complaints procedures in that regard. Complaints procedures are associated with other enactments. There are expectations that public bodies will have mechanisms to enable concerns and conciliation issues to be dealt with by the organisations themselves.
There is a concern about cost, and I am sure that the hon. Lady will be pleased to support that aspect of my argument. If the authorities can deal with the issue, that will not only save a cost to the commission; I genuinely worry that if human rights issues were brought to the commission in the way suggested, there could be a problem with the amount of work involved. If a concern can be resolved within the public authority, that is helpful to the individual who raised it. Furthermore, because the concern is dealt with in-house, it is much more likely to have an effect on the policies and procedures of that organisation and, we hope, avoid other users of the services, whatever they may be, experiencing the situation that caused the original individual to have concern about their human rights in the first place.
Under the amendment, the wide range of human rights proceedings that could be subject to conciliation would make the coherent and cost-efficient provision of such a service difficult. As hon. Members know, there is a huge range of public bodies. Whereas a health trust or local authority, for example, dealing with complaints about its service provision, has expertise and detailed knowledge of its policies and procedures, the commission, if we allowed it to provide the suggested conciliation service, could be dealing with a range of issues on which it was neither particularly expert nor able helpfully to suggest resolutions. The commission’s resources are limited, as the hon. Lady and the hon. Member for Oxford, West and Abingdon (Dr. Harris) know, and I am sure that we will have more discussion on that. We do not believe that the proposal in the amendment would offer good value for money.
I should like to reaffirm my strong support for conciliation as a way of reducing the need for disruptive and expensive litigation. Nevertheless, the nature of human rights proceedings means that they would not be suitable for inclusion in the scope of the commission’s conciliation work. I look forward to a conciliatory gesture from the hon. Gentleman in withdrawing his amendment.