MPs debate Equality Bill

Members of Parliament last night ( December 03 2009) debated new details of the Equality Bill as the legislation went to Report Stage in the House of Commons.

Representing the government, Vera Baird QC MP presented areas in the Bill which had been strengthened or amended at Committee Stage in early summer.
Ms Baird, the Solicitor General, told MPs that measures would work best if they were employer friendly, with the business case for diversity at their heart.

She said:
 “The realisation is emerging very very fully that Equality and Diversity and good business go together and are not enemies of each other at all.”  Ms Baird continued: “We don’t under-estimate the challenges that are faced by employers in dealing with a legacy of pay inequality... in order to progress quickly we have to have the buy in of both sides.”

The key aspects of the Bill from a gender perspective –relating to equal pay reporting, positive action, multiple discrimination and procurement- remain in tact at this stage, with hundreds of amendments from both the government and the opposition still subject to debate in the House of Lords.
A consensus appeared to be emerging between Labour and the Conservatives on the bulk of the proposals, and it therefore seems likely the majority of clauses in the Bill will be voted through parliament successfully in the first few weeks of 2010.
However, Conservative MPs did challenge the government on certain details of the Bill.
On positive action, John Penrose MP, Shadow Business and Enterprise Minister, made the case that the language used should be clearer, so that employers know that in a recruitment situation they can only consider a candidates demographics if he or she is ‘as qualified’ as all of the other candidates in the frame. Vera Baird responded that this was a question of semantics, and that essentially the government and opposition are in agreement on the principles.

On disability, Rt. Hon. Theresa MP, Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, argued that employers should be banned from asking candidates questions about disability or health issues prior to offering them an appointment, arguing that this would remove any bias from the process. Vera Baird disagreed, however, responding that the ability to ask such questions, in accordance with strict guidelines, would enable employers to under-take positive action on the grounds of disability, if disabled employees were under-represented in their workforce.

Theresa May also noted that the Conservatives would not support the Socio-Economic Duty on the public sector, arguing that people’s life chances could not be improved simply by legislation willing it to be the case.
The proposal to ask employers to voluntarily report publically on their gender pay gap provoked considerable debate.

Details of the proposals and the metrics employers will be expected to report against were not available at the time of the debate, as the Equality and Human Rights Commission is expected to publish these within the next two weeks. However, Vera Baird hinted that a menu of reporting options would be available to employers, in order to offer them flexibility in the reporting process, to encourage maximum compliance. Opportunity Now, a member of the EHRC’s High Level Stakeholder Group on Gender Pay Reporting, has been voicing this preference consistently on behalf of our members.

Ms Baird told MPs that the measures on pay transparency none the less presented a historic opportunity for progress, saying:

“We will advance the cause of equal pay and we will do it quickly. It will go up ten gears when this legislation comes into force, I am very confident of that.”

Conservative MPs questioned the limits of the impact of the pay transparency legislation, and argued that investment in childcare and flexible working options were equally important in closing the pay gap.
Liberal Democrat MPs pushed the government to go further on equal pay, calling for mandatory pay audits to be introduced. An initial motion to make pay audits compulsory within six months of the Bill passing was defeated by the government and by Conservative members, failing by 427 votes to 77.
Liberal Democrat Spokesperson for Youth and Equality Lynne Featherstone also argued for other measures to strengthen the law on equal pay. These included introducing representative actions for equal pay claims in which trade unions could represent the grievances of a number of employees at once, and allowing individuals bringing forward pay claims to site a ‘hypothetical comparator’ where systematic under-valuing of women’s work takes place but where no actual male can be pointed to.

Vera Baird dismissed both these proposals as complex, counter-productive and likely to have unintended consequences, but pledged that the government would re-consider another legal point raised by Liberal Democrat MPs, the right of equal pay claimants to site a ‘material factor defence’.

Some examples of best practice in achieving workplace equality were sited, including the work of Opportunity Now Champion Member Ernst and Young on identifying and removing unconscious bias in management practices.

Further scrutiny and debate over the Equality Bill will take place over the next few weeks, and Opportunity Now will continue to update members on this issue.

Below is an update on the progress of the Bill and an expected timeline for future developments: