Clause 51 - Public authorities: general
Equality Bill [Lords]
12:30 pm
Dominic Grieve (Shadow Attorney General, (Assist the Home Affairs Team); Beaconsfield, Conservative)
We now come to a clause that is of considerable importance to the Bill. The Minister will tell me if I am wrong, but if I understand it correctly, the duties imposed on public authorities are very much wider than those imposed on other people. Perhaps we should expect that.
The duty spelled out in clause 51 is a duty on the public authority not to do any act that constitutes discrimination as previously defined in clause 44. Clause 51 is not just about the provision of goods and services; it appears to go further than that. The Minister may seek to enlighten the Committee about it.
We then come to the clause’s detail. The first thing that struck me was the exceptions provided in subsection (3). The prohibition on discrimination does not apply to the House of Commons, the House of Lords, the authorities of either Houses of Parliament, the Security Service, the Secret Intelligence Service or GCHQ, nor to a part of the armed forces of the Crown that is assisting GCHQ.
One problem is the issue of what is a public authority. It would be useful if the Minister could clarify what the Government consider a public authority to be, because it appears that the term can be defined fairly loosely.
It is apparent from the Freedom of Information Act 2000, for example, that the special forces of the Crown and any unit assisting in the operation of GCHQ are already considered not to be a public authority, or are exempt from the status of public authority, which raises the question why that needs to be spelt out specifically in the clause. Equally, the House of Commons is considered to be a public authority under the Act, but not under this Bill.
There is a lack of clarity. The amendments seek to do two things. First, they ask the Minister to say what a public authority is—a question that will crop up over and over again as we discuss the other amendments that I have tabled to the clause. Secondly, they ask him to justify why the Secret Intelligence Service, the Security Service, GCHQ and the armed forces of the Crown that help GCHQ should be exempt.
An exemption may of course apply differently for different reasons. Under the Freedom of Information Act, one can see why certain bodies may be exempt, although it is noteworthy that the Security Service and the Secret Intelligence Service do not seem to be entirely exempt from an application under the Act.
We need to know why the Government believe that those bodies may be required to discriminate on the ground of religion. The same may apply to the House of Commons and the House of Lords, but I rather assumed that it could be said that we are sovereign bodies and therefore entitled to regulate ourselves, so I did not table amendments to that part of the clause.
As a first in our consideration of this rather complex and important clause, the Government need to justify why those bodies have been exempted. Notwithstanding the grandiloquent aims of the legislation, the cynic may say that the Government harbour secret anxieties about certain religions or religious groups, and believe that they should be able to discriminate simply on the ground of religion when considering the most secret matters. I should be grateful if the Minister would comment on that.