Equality Bill
12:00 pm
Vera Baird: I am glad that you agree that promoting mediation is an obvious way forward and wholly compatible with the nature of the Bill. There are structures that permit mediation in both of the obvious forums where action is likely to be taken if someone gets to the threshold of court. A person would go either to the employment tribunal and engage with ACAS or, if it regarded an outside of work provision, they would go to the county court where there is a lot of mediation. In some centres—particularly in a small claims court, where some of these cases would arise—there is an almost automatic attempt at mediation before the matter goes to court. Given that we are aiming at a culture change and that the commission is intended to drive that, one would hope that long before people started to talk about issuing proceedings, there would be an attempt to mediate if issues came to the attention of the commission. There are formal processes of mediation tucked within both of those processes.
If I understand what you are suggesting about caucusing—an interesting notion—you think that where issues are disputed, or where there is potential for dispute, we should try to talk to the lawyers for the stakeholders and hammer out the likely meaning. If there is any of that left to do, it will be a useful exercise for us to carry out before the Bill is finally enacted, so that everybody is clear about it. However, I think that we have been doing an enormous amount of that work as we have gone along, as we have been very consultative.