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Equality Act 2010 (Public Authorities and Consequential and Supplementary Amendments) Order 2011

My Lords, I rise not to oppose these regulations, but to put down a few markers and raise one or two questions. I am glad that my noble friend is at the dispatch box, not only because I have a great admiration for her, but because I can be sure that she will pass on my concerns. There may not be many to hear them today, but I can rely on her to see that others hear about them. The point about these regulations, so far as I am concerned, is that they herald very much more significant regulations and developments which are in the offing, namely, the commencement of Section 149 of the Equality Act and the implementation of the Equality Act draft specific duties regulations. In my view the coalition should be congratulated for scrapping the provisions in the Equality Act, which placed a duty on all public bodies at all times to take account of the inequalities of outcome that result from socio-economic disadvantage. In promoting equality of opportunity, one is trying to extend the freedom of people to make the most of their talents: promoting equality of outcome means allowing the state to try by rules, regulations and bureaucratic means to iron out differences in performance so that endeavour and achievement are not rewarded. I would have thought that that is the last thing that one could possibly want in a free society. The Home Secretary was entirely right to point out in a speech that while people expect fairness, there should be no seeking a world where everyone gets the same out of life regardless of what they put in. Most people were really pleased to hear her say that the Government are moving away from equality of outcome to equality of opportunity. The question is: how does what the Home Secretary has said fit in with what is in store for us? And, how much mischief by local authorities and public authorities will be encouraged by the implementation of Section 149 and the Equality Act’s specific duties regulations? I accept that much has been done in the most recent version of the specific duties regulations to reduce bureaucracy, but the regulations will still require public authorities to publish equality objectives which are specific and measurable—and that means, in plain English, targets. They will require them to gather information to show that they are complying with those targets. That sounds to me very much more like equality of outcome as an approach than the one that the Secretary of State says that she now espouses. What is clear, though, is that Section 149 and the regulations place extra burdens on local authorities and other bodies, and present local authorities in particular with new distractions when they should be concentrating on providing basics services. I should like to know how local authorities are going to meet the cost of the new duties. Is it not a pound to a penny that some authorities will continue cutting important services and then blame the Government for having placed new burdens on them? Of course there are far wider issues than cost involved, and we can explore those in detail when the regulations on the specific duties are debated. Once again, however, the emphasis is being put on equality when public authorities have already behaved in the most monstrous way in the name of equality, putting the most bizarre limits on the freedom of citizens of this country. I need only cite the preposterous case of the council trying to strip a care home of council funding because the people running it did not want to keep asking their elderly residents about their sexual orientation, and the scandalous case of the nurse suspended for offering to pray for a patient. I fear that all this setting of equality objectives threatens to accelerate the marginalisation that Christians are already experiencing. We can be sure of one thing: Christians and their treatment will not be monitored to see that they are getting a fair deal. I would have thought that we could all agree that we should be tolerant of the views of others. In recent years, though, we as a society seem to have passed through the stage of tolerance, giving it but a casual nod, and instead rights are everything. Rights must be enforced, however trivial has been the breach of a right, and however easy and painless it would have been to have left the right unenforced out of respect for the views of others. There are many here who know the sort of case that I am referring to. In short, this obsession with rights and equality has driven tolerance out of the door and bred in its place intolerance, injustice and unfairness. Now, with the report to the Equalities and Human Rights Commission recommending that children of 11 should be asked if they are gay, it threatens the very rights of both parents and children. Surely it is time that we stepped back and asked ourselves some very serious questions about where we are going. It is certainly time that we made sure that in legislation there is protection for those with deeply held religious beliefs and who want no more than to be able to continue to follow tenets of their religion that only a very few years ago virtually all of us accepted as wholly unexceptionable. I therefore ask my noble friend to recognise that there is great concern about all these regulations. She must expect a few fireworks when the more fundamental regulations come before the House.