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Equality Bill

My Lords, the amendments in this group all seek to achieve the same, specific objective: to give the same protection from discrimination in employment on grounds of being married or in a civil partnership to all people who might suffer discrimination on the ground of their marital status. In other words, anyone who is unfairly discriminated against by an employer or prospective employer simply because they are unmarried, widowed or divorced should have a legitimate complaint of unlawful discrimination in the same way as a married person currently does. These are the same amendments that I brought forward in Committee but which I withdrew because the Government argued that the evidence was not strong enough to justify their acceptance. I should like to try again to convince the Government that these amendments are important and should be incorporated into the Bill. There are three main reasons for this. First, the purpose of the Bill is meant to be to harmonise protection and to strengthen and extend protection in certain circumstances. For example, the provisions on age discrimination are being extended and new provisions on gender reassignment are being introduced. The marital status gap is an obvious loophole, which has needed plugging since 1975 when the Sex Discrimination Act first came into force. Employment practices and social norms and expectations have changed since then and discrimination against married women in the workforce is much less of an issue than it was, but the Government, rightly in my view, have decided to retain and not abandon protection from marriage discrimination in case its removal should have the unintended consequence of triggering the revival of unacceptable behaviour. The Government should also take the opportunity to extend similar precautionary protection from marital status discrimination across the board. That would be in line with the overall strategy of the Bill, which I do not think was ever meant to be just a tidying-up exercise to consolidate the dozens of different pieces of disparate equality law. Secondly, I am concerned that in an economic climate for employers of serious cost-cutting and cutbacks it is quite possible that certain work-related benefits might be targeted and subject to just this sort of discriminatory revision. New and often subtle ways of discriminating might well creep back or emerge. No one, of course, would be able to get away with refusing, let us say, relocation expenses to a married employee, but an employer might lawfully decide, if the Bill remains as it is, to save a bit of money by saying that single employees were no longer eligible for relocation costs. Other ways in which single people could face marital status discrimination might include through not being entitled to the same terms of compassionate leave as married employees, being required to work shifts or unsocial hours or being required to work on days, such as Christmas Day, from which married people were first in line to be excused. These examples would not be money-saving for an employer but they are examples of the type of practice that used to be common and might easily be revived if the message of a piece of flagship new legislation from the Government is that only married employees continue to deserve marital status protection at work. Thirdly—I hope that this part of my argument might persuade the Government to think carefully about accepting my amendments—marital status protection is already the accepted norm or status quo for very large numbers of people. It might not be enshrined in the Sex Discrimination Act but it is what most people assume already exists. Hundreds of thousands of employees in this country work for companies or organisations with their own equal opportunities policies, where marital status is included in the list of criteria and where discrimination is prohibited. It is always the case that marital status protection applies to all employees, not just the married ones. In Committee I cited a few examples of prominent employers from the public, private and voluntary sectors where this is the case. I have investigated a bit further and have found many dozens of employers who include marital status in their equality policies. I cannot find a single one that has a policy to protect only married people in the way in which the Sex Discrimination Act does and this Bill now proposes to continue. In particular, I hope that the Government will pause to ask why a policy of across-the-board marital status protection is good enough for the 524,000 people who work in the Civil Service and the more than 2,000 people who work in both Houses of Parliament but for some reason is not appropriate to include in the legislation for everybody else. It has been suggested to me that there may well be situations where an employer legitimately and fairly needs to discriminate against a person on the ground of their marital status to preserve standards of good governance or ethics—for example, to avoid having a cohabiting couple being co-signatories to a bank account. That is a fair point, but it would apply equally to a married couple and I cannot accept that it is a barrier to doing the decent and logical thing in this Bill. After all, if employers such as Marks & Spencer, BP, Britvic, Oxfam and a plethora of local authorities and police forces, not to mention the entire Civil Service, have managed to find ways of dealing with such situations within the context of a fully inclusive marital status policy, these kinds of problems are clearly not insurmountable. Appropriate management procedures would be able to deal with them and this should not be an obstacle to taking a principled stance on discrimination in the legislation. Without my amendments, the Bill would send a negative message to employers and there might be a risk of retrenchment within existing equality policies at the expense of people who are not married but who should in my view be equally protected against discrimination on grounds of marital status. If the Government are reluctant to accept my amendments on the ground that they take the existing law further than the status quo, I respectfully suggest that the status quo against which they should be looking to measure is the status quo of existing good practice. Our equality law should surely reflect and encourage that, not undermine or undercut it. Could it really be right in the 21st century that an employer should be able to refuse promotion to a widower with dependent children because of an assumption that he has too much on his plate and cannot take on any extra responsibility? Could it be right in the 21st century that a backward-looking employer could lawfully refuse to employ a divorcee simply because he or she is divorced? I was talking only last week to somebody who said that it had crossed her mind when she applied for a head teacher’s post that being divorced might just count against her. If it had, she would not have been able to put her finger on the discriminatory point or process, because this is exactly the kind of discrimination that takes place and operates under the radar. That is one reason why there is such a lack of evidence in terms of case studies. If this were in the law, at least it would get a mention on training courses in recruitment and selection procedures, so that people would see that a marker had been put down and know that they had to avoid such discrimination, which would be unlawful. I really do not believe that it is right for the Government to pass up what has been described as a once in a generation opportunity to put equality law in order. Finally, I reassure noble Lords that my amendments are not in any way anti-marriage. They simply seek to apply the same standard of protection consistently to all people, irrespective of marital status. I beg to move.