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Equality Bill

My Lords, I also support the amendment for all the reasons set out by my noble friend Lord Ouseley but also because I have given some thought to what the Minister said in her reply to me in Committee when I put forward a similar amendment with a similar purpose. She said that these matters would be dealt with by the specific equality duties that would be set out in regulations at a later date. I have thought about that but I really do not think that that would be adequate, because the public sector equality duty applies to private and voluntary sector bodies when they exercise public functions. However, under the Bill, any specific duties imposed by regulations would, as I understand it, apply only to public authorities listed in Schedule 19 and would therefore not apply to private or voluntary sector bodies that carry out public functions. Increasingly, public functions at local and national level are carried out by private and voluntary sector bodies. This is particularly true in education—I think in particular of nursery education—but it also happens in health, prisons, social care and some aspects of social housing. As well as any equality obligations built into their contracts, such bodies, when taking over the functions of public authorities, should, I believe, be bound in the same way as public authorities to meet their equality duty, and I think that the amendment provides the only way to define for such bodies what they need to do in order to comply.