Clause 1
Equality Bill
1:00 pm
Vera Baird (Solicitor General, Attorney General's Office; Redcar, Labour)
It is good to be under your chairpersonship on this Bill, Lady Winterton. I understand that we are going to be less peripatetic than before, which might help logistics. We did wonder whether we ought to introduce an extra strand in the Bill for wandering MPs: we had have three rooms. We shall proceed more easily now that we are not wandering about so much.
I was still talking—not wishing to sound as if I have been long-winded—about amendment 107. Many people have chosen to have a piece of the amendment 107 pie. I draw the Committee’s attention to a new document that has appeared. Members know well that there is a new single equality duty on public authorities, and that will be supported by specific duties. We have undertaken to consult on how the specific duties should be put together. That document is now available on the Table at the back of the room if Members would like to take a copy.
The hon. Member for Forest of Dean said that sometimes regulators of the kind referred to in amendment 107 did indeed have some strategic input. I accept the point that he made, although they are better characterised as reactive. However, even where they take or influence such decisions, they implement them through the bodies that they regulate, and the duty will not fall upon the bodies that are regulated. There is no lack of sympathy among Ministers with the intention behind amendment 107. It has been argued with great strength, and has garnered support, and we will look again to make sure that we are not wrong, but we think it misses the target at which it is aimed.
I turn to amendment 181, which, again, would extend the duty to all public sector inspectorates, with the purpose of driving it through the public sector more broadly. Again, I sympathise totally, but similar arguments apply. Those inspectorates do not, by and large, take the long-term decisions that we want the duty to hit, and if they do, they implement them through the bodies they inspect. Unless we are prepared to extend the duty to the whole public sector—we have limited it to the groups that we regard as the strategic ones—there is no real point in extending it to the inspectorates.