Equality Bill
12:00 pm
John Penrose (Shadow Minister, Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform; Weston-Super-Mare, Conservative)
I want to return to some of our earlier questions this morning, starting with public sector procurement. In particular, I was struck and a little concerned, because, for example, whenever you listen to Ministers from the Department for Work and Pensions talking about welfare to work, they are most insistent that all the outsourcing they are doing of welfare-to-work programmes has to be done on what they are now calling a black-box basis. That means it is outcome-based: they pay by results. They do not, within some very basic legal minima, ask how the results are achieved. They just pay according to how many people get back into work, how fast, and how long they stay there. If we start requiring the subcontractors to comply with public sector equality duties of one sort or another and to provide information on how they are going to satisfy all these other duties, rather than just asking questions about what they have achieved, is there not some kind of conflict or tension there with some of your colleagues?