Clause 1
Equality Bill
9:00 am
Mark Harper (Shadow Minister, Work & Pensions; Forest of Dean, Conservative)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship this morning, Mr. Benton. I shall speak to amendments 2 and 4 and the group of measures before us. I shall see whether you let me get away with making some wider remarks on the clause or whether you wish me to hold them over for a stand part debate.
Amendment 2 is straightforward. It deals with how the Government have decided to set out the public authorities to which the clause relates. The strategy they have adopted is to list a number of authorities, but clause 2 gives Ministers the power by regulations to amend primary legislation. The Conservatives are reluctant to allow Ministers the power to amend primary legislation by order and the amendment sets out a different approach.
We would set out a power for Ministers of the Crown by regulations to list public authorities to which the measure applied. If they wished to add or remove public authorities from that list, they would simply change the secondary legislation. That is a better way to go about things, rather than allowing Ministers to amend primary legislation by order. This is a technical amendment.
Amendment 4 would remove subsection (4), which applies the measure to partner authorities of local authorities “in relation to” their
“preparation and modification of a sustainable community strategy.”
To explain the purpose of the amendment, I need to explain our concerns and objections to the measure. Ministers are a little confused about the difference between discrimination and disadvantage, which point my hon. Friend the Member for Weston-super-Mare has made before.
Ministers appear to be confusing the poor opportunities of socio-economically disadvantaged communities with discrimination. That is a wrong-headed approach because the solution to sorting out socio-economic inequalities is to deal with their root cause, and for Ministers and other public authorities to tackle them. For example, the reason for the educational disadvantage experienced by those who come from poor areas is often that they do not have access to good schools. The duty in the Bill is not the solution; rather, it is for bodies to do something to arrange the provision of good schools.
My concern about the measure, and the argument for the amendment, is that Ministers are in danger of setting expectations that are destined to fail—it is as if the clause says, “Everyone has the right to a good life.” We do not solve such problems simply by passing a law. A good example is the fuel poverty legislation that the House passed a number of years ago. It effectively said that fuel poverty would no longer exist. Of course, several years after that legislation was passed by the House and the other place, fuel poverty still exists—indeed, it is getting worse, not better. That is a fundamentally wrong-headed approach to solving some of those problems.