Clause 77
Equality Bill
5:15 pm
Vera Baird (Solicitor General, Attorney General's Office; Redcar, Labour)
I am pleased to be able to make this clear. As the hon. Gentleman said, leaving out “with or” would, in effect, exclude the power to make modifications to the provisions. However, the power is a limited one that allows the provisions of part 5 to be modified in their application to offshore work, but it does not allow any limitation of the substance of the protections in the Bill. How the protections apply may be modified. If we accepted the amendments, we could only use the order-making power in clause 77 to apply part 5 and the corresponding Northern Ireland legislation to offshore work without modifications.
Modifications of the law, when applied by means of secondary legislation, are not new; it is simply a prudent approach to drafting. I could give several examples. For instance, section 201 of the Employment Rights Act 1996 enables the application of that Act “with or without modification”. So we are not doing anything novel. It is important in a consolidation exercise to ensure that we have sufficient flexibility, especially in relation to offshore work, to adapt the legislation to the technical and practical realities of the offshore environment. We do not have any modification in mind at present, but we might at some point find it necessary to adapt the terminology in part 5 to ensure that it translates appropriately to particular circumstances—for example, those of workers who spend part of their time on ships and part on rigs.
Such an approach will facilitate a clearer and more accurate application of the provisions of part 5 in what is characteristically a very fluid area of employment, thus enabling the modifications that might be necessary to ensure that the law works in the various situations to which it will be applied. Probably the important point is that this is about the modification of the application to offshore work, but it does not allow any limitation of the substance of the protections contained in the Bill. That is probably the point about which the hon. Gentleman sought assurance, and I am pleased to be able to give it.