Clause 59
Equality Bill
12:00 pm
Vera Baird (Solicitor General, Attorney General's Office; Redcar, Labour)
I thank all members of the Committee for their indulgence and for allowing me to take a most important telephone call about the steelworks in my constituency, which I could not put off until the end of our sitting. I want to explain, not least to the public, what has been going on. I am most grateful to you, Mr. Benton, and to colleagues.
I was saying that we could have taken an alternative approach, scrapping the contractual approach and allowing discrimination claims in parallel with it. They were the two options. However, all the difficult issues that arise in equal pay matters would come from that approach, too, even though they would come in a different order. It is clear that, if we made a wholesale change, the potential would exist for issues that have already been settled by the courts to be revisited. It is also likely that, more often or not, after expensive litigation the result would be the same.
There would always be the possibility, too, of new difficulties arising such as a claim advanced on the basis of a statistical analysis of the pay given to groups of workers doing different work, differently valued, perhaps showing that paying one group more disadvantages women who make up a smaller proportion of that group. Perhaps I should repeat that. A claim advanced on the basis of a statistical analysis of the pay given to groups of workers doing very different work—differently valued—could show that paying more to one group more disadvantages women who make up a smaller proportion of that group. One could see such a situation arising. Is that on its own to be the basis for a claim?
Surely the right response to that is not artificially to increase the pay of one group, but to seek to ensure by other means that women are as well represented in the higher paid group as in the lower. There might be risks of such cases arising. It would not be right to take the substantial risk that a large number of new cases, which would ultimately fail, would arise in such a way.
Doubtless we will have this argument again in various guises throughout consideration of the Bill, but that is a key point to raise at this stage. Changing to a different model could lead to uncertainty with more litigation and unpredictable outcomes for employers and employees alike. We are not convinced that any real advantages for women would be achieved by that change to offset the disadvantages. Right now there is a need for stability.
What the hon. Members for Hornsey and Wood Green and for Oxford, West and Abingdon propose goes beyond the protection offered by indirect discrimination, and I suggest it goes a very long way. What the issues expose is in part related to the question of where the boundary lies between individual disadvantage, which can be corrected by the Bill, and the disadvantages that arise in society, which should be dealt with by policies aimed at closing the pay gap rather than individual remedy.