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Mr. Gerald Howarth: The hon. Gentleman has mentioned the CRE several times. He obviously knows much about that organisation. Will he enlighten the House as to why it went through a stormy patch when the West Indians and Asians were at loggerheads? The matter was well reported by one of the commissioners, Mrs. Cluff. Does he think that that was a case of discrimination by one group against another, or not?
Mr. Khabra: The CRE was set up in 1976 to address the issue of racism in this country. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman's party was not happy that an institution was established to fight racism.
It would not be surprising to find that public bodies providing services such as education, health or policing discriminated against ethnic minority tenants on estates such as I described. In my constituency, where the Tories were in control for 13 years, that happened on many council estates.
The Bill would enable such discrimination to be challenged. I agree with the CRE that
The Labour Government introduced the Race Relations Acts of 1968 and 1976. I am proud to be an ethnic minority Labour MP when a Labour Government are introducing another vital piece of race legislation that will benefit not only many of my constituents, but all ethnic minorities throughout the UK. That is in contrast to the Tories, who in their rule did nothing to ensure that public bodies were subject to the full force of the 1976 Act despite the fact that they were in power for 18 years. They allowed unemployment among the ethnic minorities to grow steadily, which in turn left them feeling totally disillusioned with politics.
Sir Peter Lloyd (Fareham):
I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for Ealing, Southall (Mr. Khabra). He has long personal experience of the issues covered by the Bill, and I am sorry that his involvement in them has led him to be in continuing receipt of hate mail. That is extraordinarily unpleasant.
I shall touch on some things that the hon. Gentleman said in his speech with rather less agreement, but I am glad that the Government have introduced the Bill. However, my welcome for it would have been much more muted, if the Home Secretary had not announced his intention to table amendments to extend it to cover indirect discrimination in the public sector, which is not covered by the Race Relations Act 1976. As the Home Secretary and my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Miss Widdecombe), the shadow Home Secretary, have said, it must be wrong that
the state, which should protect all its citizens, may discriminate unfairly on the basis of race when private organisations cannot. It has become plain that that anomaly must be removed if ethnic minorities are to feel confident that public institutions give them equal respect and value. I am sorry that that was not done sooner, not least by the Government of whom I was a member.
I return to the points made by the hon. Member for Southall and to the question that my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidstone and The Weald asked of the Home Secretary. The anomaly was not removed earlier because it is assumed that Governments are always virtuous and look after everyone, so that the law is not needed. It is assumed that they have loftier purposes than private organisations and may sometimes need to discriminate to achieve these higher ends for everyone. It follows that Governments are such a complex mystery that disgruntled people may not discern their higher purpose or practical necessity and so bring a stream of vexatious actions that undermine or frustrate wise policy and good administration. There is something to be said for those views, and I shall return to the last point in due course. But they go a long way to explaining why the previous Government left matters as they were and why the present Government introduced the Bill in its present form and intended to extend the law to cover only direct discrimination in that part of the public sector not covered by the 1976 Act.
Despite the Macpherson recommendations, the Bill was initially prepared only to make direct discrimination by subordinates unlawful while it would have preserved the immunity of Ministers, senior decision makers and the policy-making process. I am glad that pressure from both sides in the other place caused the Government to think again, and I was happy to hear that my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidstone and The Weald is prepared to be convinced, too.
We all know that the genesis of the Bill was the Macpherson inquiry into the police handling of the appallingly unhappy case of the Stephen Lawrence murder. I declare my interest as parliamentary adviser to the Police Federation as recorded in the Register of Members' Interests. I emphasise that I seek to advise the federation; I do not speak for it and I am not doing so in this debate, except perhaps to say that it has long made genuine and consistent efforts to create an environment in which black and Asian officers feel valued and at home in the police service. I am sure that its chairman, Fred Broughton, will appreciate the Home Secretary's kind and well justified reference to him.
I am sure that it would harm the police's interests if they continued to be outside the full range of the 1976 Act, especially if the rest of the public sector were brought within its scope. Suspicion, from which they already suffer, would continue to multiply without any satisfactory opportunity to put it to the test. Reform would continue to be ignored by a large swathe of public opinion and its effectiveness would be discounted if there were no access to the courts. But it is understandable that the police, like the other parts of the public sector now to be brought under the 1976 Act, should be apprehensive about how the extended law will work and how it will impinge on their operational effectiveness.
Mr. Andrew Rowe (Faversham and Mid-Kent):
My right hon. Friend is on to an important point. For example,
Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Michael J. Martin):
Order. The hon. Gentleman's intervention is too long.
Sir Peter Lloyd:
I hope that my hon. Friend will have a chance to develop that point further. If he is suggesting that the extension of the provisions for indirect discrimination will make it harder for the police to gather and follow up evidence on the contacts of the individuals whom they know to be criminals, I do not think that it will have that effect.
Let us consider the example of stop and search, which has often been referred to, including by my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidstone and The Weald. The fear has been expressed that the possibility of challenges in court will further reduce the police's ability or their confidence to use that necessary power. However, the evidence is that the power has been undermined already by criticism and complaint, and the police are now reported to be reluctant to use it even when they should. I am sure that the only practical remedy is for stop and search procedures to be clearly on all fours with the law, so that their robust and necessary execution stands up in court. The natural response is that that is easily said, but hard to achieve without making stop and search ineffectual. I understand that argument, but the law gives the police the power to stop and search when that is operationally justified. That is a similar point to the one that I made earlier in response to my hon. Friend.
When the powers are challenged, sensible decisions by the courts will give the police more confidence to use them effectively than in the present twilight world of misused statistics, media criticism and their own disciplinary proceedings carried out with an eye on what the newspapers will say. The same is true to a greater or lesser extent of the immigration service, the Prison Service and those who work in health and safety and other parts of the public sector. It is right that people who have been treated unfairly by any part of the public sector because of their race or colour should have a means of remedy. It is socially corrosive when they do not.
Both the complainant and the individual or organisation that is complained about will have to be able to rely on the court's ability to get to the heart of the issue and apply the law with common sense and proportion. The Bill's success will depend on the wisdom and insight demonstrated by the court. By success, I mean creating among every ethnic group the conviction that they are being treated fairly, without creating among officials the belief that they can no longer do their job effectively.
That is made more difficult by the fact, to which my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidstone and The Weald also referred, that Macpherson lighted on the phrase "institutional racism" to describe the underlying problem. Unfortunately, it has journalistic panache, and I cannot see any alternative phrase displacing it. Not many people would seriously argue with the report's definition of the phrase, on which the Home Secretary accurately
and eloquently expanded in response to an intervention. However, I am afraid that most people do not listen to these debates or read the small print in reports. They absorb headlines, and the phrase, unexplained, powerfully suggests a deliberate, officially sanctioned policy of treating unfairly people from racial minorities. That is not fair to any part of the public sector--not the police, the immigration service or the Prison Service.
If that impression is allowed to continue, other public sector groups, as well as the police, will feel resentment and a sense of injustice at what they presume the public thinks them guilty of. The same process will also lead ethnic minorities and others to believe that their worst suspicions have been justified. We are in danger of finding ourselves in a confrontational situation in which both sides feel unjustly treated and in which it will be harder to achieve the positive attitudes necessary for rooting out the unfair assumptions and practices that are wittingly, or more often unwittingly, manifested in parts of the public sector.
As I said, the Government and their senior advisers are bound to have the added worry that making indirect discrimination in the public sector unlawful will open up official policy and procedures to interminable challenge that they discriminate in their effect on different ethnic groups. That fear is not as real as is often made out. Only 3 per cent. of cases in which the law presently applies are concerned with indirect discrimination, although I can well believe that the proportion will rise among cases in which the public sector is concerned. However, that need not become a matter of acute concern. After all, the law does not ban policies that have a disproportionate effect on different social groups if the policies are justified in their own terms and are applied in a manner that produces the least disproportionate effect possible.
The fears of the immigration service, particularly concerning asylum, which are shared by my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidstone and The Weald, were spelled out by the Minister in another place and mentioned by the Home Secretary. Those fears do not take into account the way in which the law is supposed to work. I have no doubt that the Bill will lead to changes in the way in which the public sector manages itself, but there is no reason why it should put well-founded, justifiable policies at risk. It will make the implementation of some of those policies fairer than it is now.
That happy state of affairs will not necessarily be arrived at easily or quickly. Public sector policies and practices are complex and varied. It is easy to see discrimination where none exists, and where it does exist, it is easy to mistake the cause and the remedy, particularly where indirect discrimination is alleged. The wisdom of the courts would be tested if, unaided, they had to resolve every such complaint. We badly need an expert body to investigate complaints of indirect discrimination that has the confidence of the complainants and the respect of the public sector organisations being complained about.
The Commission for Racial Equality was set up to fulfil that role, and it has performed a number of constructive investigations, including in the Ministry of Defence and the NHS. I know better its campaign to get racism out of football, in which it sought to work with football clubs and the football authorities, supporting them in a mostly successful effort to tackle a problem on which the clubs and authorities had not properly focused before.
That approach will be badly needed if the Bill is to work effectively. I am not at all sure whether the CRE is now well enough resourced or whether it has a sufficient range of skills, expertise and experience to do this much more demanding job in the public sector as thoroughly as it should be done.
a positive duty to promote racial equality would require all the relevant authorities to examine the outcome of their policies and practices and to identify and change those that are discriminatory.
Labour Governments have always been at the forefront in combating racial discrimination. The Labour party, the trade unions and many other groups campaigned in that fight for many years despite the fact that the Conservative Government had no intention of introducing legislation to root out racism in this country.
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