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Equality Bill [HL]

My Lords, I shall not repeat my general points about inserting inappropriately prescriptive provisions into the Bill, but I should like the noble Lord to reflect on the following. This is not an Equality Commission alone; it is a Commission for Equality and Human Rights. If the noble Lord was right in his general approach, it would also follow that there should be in the human rights area of the commission a series of committees dealing with torture, inhuman and degrading treatment, forced labour, trade union rights within the human rights framework, free speech, privacy and so on. I suggest that we cannot look at this commission as being only about equality—it is about equality and human rights—and its membership and committee structure must meet the needs of the holistic view of the overall commission. That presents a further difficulty with breaking into ““commitology””, as it is known in Europe.