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Equality Bill

The amendments in this first group all relate to the scope of the Bill and are either concessionary or clarificatory. They are fairly random in their subject matter, so I shall take them in numerical order. Lords amendment 1 provides a power to add caste as a subset of race, which is covered by clause 9. The case for legislating against caste discrimination has been argued with passion during the Bill's passage by Members of this House and in the other place. We have seen a good deal of evidence that caste can affect how people in Britain are treated, but the evidence has largely been about discrimination in relation to personal or social situations—for instance, the choice of who a person should marry—that are well outside the scope of discrimination law. The small amount of mainly anecdotal evidence of caste discrimination occurring in areas covered by the Bill—employment, education and the provision of services, for example—emerged late in the day, when the Anti Caste Discrimination Alliance published a report last November. The Government acted on that report and asked the Equality and Human Rights Commission to undertake further in-depth research, but it did not wish to do so. We immediately commissioned the National Institute of Economic and Social Research to undertake further research into the nature and extent of the problem. That research is under way, and it involves talking to a wide range of community stakeholders and conducting detailed face-to-face interviews with about 35 people who claim to have experienced caste discrimination. The report from this in-depth study is due in August.