Committee (4th Day)

Part of Equality Bill – in the House of Lords at 7:00 pm on 25 January 2010.

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Photo of The Bishop of Winchester The Bishop of Winchester Bishop 7:00, 25 January 2010

My Lords, I welcome the amendment in the name of the noble and learned Lord and what he said about it. I was expecting him also to note that this is an area of the Bill where Parliament was particularly badly served by the practices at the other end of the Corridor. I believe that similar amendments were laid before the other place, but they were guillotined very quickly. It is a great pity that the House is so sparsely attended, given that we have such important business. I welcome the points made by the noble and learned Lord and I value the explication of the noble Lord, Lord Lester, of why Amendment 101ZA was otiose.

I turn to Amendments 101A to 101C and 125B. The effect of the two amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Turner, and, if I understand them rightly, those in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lester, seems to be an utter impracticality. They would be likely to have the effect, if they were passed, of driving Christian and religiously based organisations out of the market for providing publicly funded services and, therefore, of removing from government at every level, nationally, regionally and locally, the opportunity to buy in services of a particular faith-based character and of a particular quality of excellence. At the minute, as I understand it, it is very much the policy of the Government to do that, which is an element of their activities that I welcome.

It is entirely impractical to suggest that a church or a faith-based organisation could be doing its work with its usual staff, for some of whom there would be a genuine occupational requirement of the sort that has been discussed under the Bill, but that, at the point when those same staff or that same charity were contracted to provide a service for government, whether national or local, the existing staff would not be usable for that purpose. The charity could not possibly employ another lot of staff or some other staff. There could not be two sets of staff and, if it was working without the staff doing its mainstream activity, it could not be offering the service for which it was contracted. If I understand the gist of the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Turner, and the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, which is saying the same thing, I cannot think how that could be practical.

Amendments 101C and 125B seem to be a further narrowing of exemptions and a further restriction on religious organisations or organisations with a religious ethos in offering public services and receiving public money for bits of their work. I take paragraph 176 of the report on the Bill by the Joint Committee on Human Rights to be the background to the noble Lord's amendments and his speech. The report states:

"We are concerned about the status of employees of organisations delivering public services who find themselves as employees of organisations with a religious ethos who have been contracted to provide the public service".

That seems to put the cart before the horse. An organisation would be contracted to provide a public service because it already provides that kind of service in work for which it does not receive public money. The report continues:

"They have a right not to be subjected to religious discrimination on the basis of the ethos of the contracting organisation if they are otherwise performing their job satisfactorily".

It is necessary to say again that, if those involved are people for whom a genuine occupational requirement is permissible, they will be representing the organisation with its faith-based ethos or the church. If their personal lives are contradictory to their own faith-based position and that of the organisation or the church, they will not be performing their job satisfactorily. That is the essence of this case and the reasons why Amendment 101C, which I now understand as I did not before, and Amendment 125B are insupportable.