Clause 73
Equality Bill
12:00 pm
John Penrose (Shadow Minister, Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform; Weston-Super-Mare, Conservative)
The hon. Gentleman comes on to a point that I plan to make in the clause stand part debate about the Government’s impact assessment. I shall confine my remarks for the moment to quoting a comment which is attributed—although many are—to Jack Welch, former, much celebrated chief executive of General Electric in the States. When he was being presented with a very long and involved set of financial projections by someone from General Electric’s finance department, which involved detailed calculations that were expressed to many decimal points, he looked at the chap making the presentation and said, “Son, I don’t know about the accuracy of those last two digits in that number, but I am pretty sure that the first one is wrong.” I feel that the calculation of the costs of this measure is woefully under-egged, which goes directly to my contention about proportionality.