The
Solicitor-General: May I take this opportunity, before we
put our final question, to thank you, Mr. Benton, for your
fair and helpful chairing, and may I through you offer our thanks to
Lady Winterton, who has been as fair, helpful and engaging as you have
been? I add our note of thanks to your fellow Chairmen, Mr.
Taylor and Mr. Bercow. There was an empty chair at some
strategic point in this Committee, which both of them in sequence were
able to fill, and we owe them a debt of gratitude for coming to our
rescue at that stage. You, Mr. Benton, and Lady Winterton
have ensured that the Bill has had a fair hearing in the evidence
sessions and has been subject to proper scrutiny subsequently. That is
no mean task, because it is large and
wide-ranging. I
am most grateful to my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary,
Government Equalities Office, for his support in the Committee. I am
also grateful to all Committee members from all parties for their
contributions. I think that we have focused on the right issues and
ensured that the most important have had a good airing.
We have
discussed the Bill mostly in a constructive and positive way, while
recognising that there are, as one would expect, different views on
some of the many matters that it covers. These are important issues,
and I am pleased that they have been treated with the seriousness, and
given the attention, that they deserve. Occasionally, they have been
given attention again and again, but they have none the less been
treated in an appropriately serious way.
I thank the hon. Members for
Forest of Dean and for Hornsey and Wood Green for their contributions
and for leading on behalf of their parties. May I also seek your
indulgence, Mr. Benton, to make particular fond reference to
the hon. Member for Daventry, who has told us that he is retiring from
Parliament at the next general election? Over the years, he has made a
magnificent contribution to the cause of equality and particularly to
the cause of the disabled. He has made an excellent and characteristic
contribution in this Committee, and his comments have been very well
informed and sensitive. We shall miss him, his intellectual rigour, his
robust common sense and, overwhelmingly, his compassion.
I am grateful
to the Clerks, who have supported us all in the Committee. I am
grateful to the attendants, the police and to the Hansard
writers, who do not always have a straightforward job. I also thank the
officials from the Government Equalities Office and from other
Departments that were involved in the Bill. They
could
not have been more helpful to me, staff on the Committee, the Hansard
writers and, from time to time, other members of the
Committee. I
am pleased that we have been able to take forward our debate in a
rational and positive way. The Bill has been improved by scrutiny and
by a number of amendments, although they were all the
Government’s. However, I have agreed to consider five matters:
whether to include various fire and rescue bodies in the socio-economic
duty, as proposed by the hon. Member for Hornsey and Wood Green; the
clarification, if necessary, of the asymmetric nature of disability
protection in clause 13(3); the issue around the case of Malcolm and
whether we need to make the protection in clause 14 clearer; the case
for representative actions; and, very recently, whether to limit the
use of pre-employment disability questionnaires. That is a little
survey of the work that I still have to do before we gather again on
Report. I will seriously consider all those proposals.
This is a
good Bill, which will advance the cause of equality, and I hope that it
will help to drive culture change. It still has to go through one or
two stages, but I could not resist looking back at a series of cartoons
about equality that I have in my office. We have been advancing the
cause of gender equality to a large extent, and one really nice cartoon
shows a lady, whose hands are in the kitchen sink and covered with
Fairy Liquid-type bubbles, saying to her little girl, “I have to
keep my hands soft in case I ever get back to being a brain
surgeon.” The second cartoon that caught my eye depicted a
figure lamenting, “Seasonal work, long hours, low pay, no health
and safety, no danger money, but they did say I could keep the
dress”—it is the fairy on top of the Christmas tree. I am
grateful to all participants and I look forward to our proceedings on
Report.
Mr.
Harper: Without repeating everything that the Minister has
said, I would like to echo her thanks to you, Mr. Benton,
and, through you, thank Lady Winterton, Mr. Taylor and
Mr. Bercow—if we are still allowed to call him that
now that he has been elevated to the Chair.
I thank the
Clerks and the witnesses, whom I do not think the Minister mentioned.
As she said, the evidence that they gave in our evidence-taking
sessions was very helpful in some of our later deliberations. I would
also like to thank those who have served us in the Committee room,
including the Doorkeepers and the police officers.
I thank
members of the public who have listened to our
proceedings—sometimes with great interest and sometimes, I am
sure, with less interest. I also thank all members of the Committee for
our debates, particularly my hon. Friend the Member for
Weston-super-Mare, who sadly is not here to listen to my thanking him
for his work in supporting me on the Front
Bench. I
echo the Minister’s comments about my hon. Friend the Member for
Daventry, who, on this particular subject, brings a huge amount of
wisdom and experience both in office and outside it. If he is not
dragooned into being a member of another Committee, this may well have
been his last Public Bill Committee before he leaves the House. That
will be sad. He has conducted himself to the credit of the Committee
and has brought a great deal of wisdom to our proceedings on a number
of matters, for which I am grateful—as is the hon. and learned
Lady.
I also thank
my hon. Friend the Member for Henley, who for most sittings has been
splitting himself between our proceedings and those on the Finance
Bill, and has acquitted himself well. Last, but not least, I thank our
Whip, my hon. Friend the Member for Billericay. We must never forget
the Whips or they will certainly never forget
us. I
thank the Minister for the way in which we have had a good-natured and
fruitful debate on most occasions, apart from when I usually spoilt
them by referring to Baroness Thatcher, which seemed to rile the hon.
and learned Lady. Apart from that, she has dealt with the Committee in
an even-handed and thoughtful way, and I echo her thanks to her
officials who, on occasions, have been very helpful to the
Opposition. I
also thank the hon. Member for Hornsey and Wood Green, who speaks for
the Liberal Democrats on such matters. Finally, I thank the hon. Member
for Glasgow, East, who speaks for the Scottish National party, although
on many occasions, as he made clear, not on religious matters, when he
spoke for himself. I thank you again, Mr. Benton. We are
almost
there.
Lynne
Featherstone: I wish to say what a pleasure it has been to
serve under your chairmanship, Mr. Benton, and through you I
convey my thanks to Lady Winterton. I thank the Clerk and the officials
who have helped to make our proceedings so pleasant and smooth running.
The hon. Member for Daventry has added wisdom, and I often found that
we were speaking in a similar manner on similar issues. That may or may
not please him—I have no idea—but he brought a great deal
of experience to the
Committee. I
thank my excellent colleague, the hon. Member for Oxford, West and
Abingdon, who has scrutinised in great detail, with great wisdom and
commitment, parts of the Bill, which after all is the job of the
Opposition. Despite the occasional strange look on the faces of members
of the Committee, he has done a remarkable job. The Solicitor-General
has omitted one thing. We have had a very good debate and I am very
pleased with the matters that she will take away to look at, and
perhaps bring
back. I
should be very interested in, and look forward to hearing about, the
results of the work of the Department for Work and Pensions on
discrimination in the workplace. I also thank the hon. and learned Lady
for her tolerance and patience on some occasions and for conducting the
Committee. I have not taken part in many proceedings in Committee, as
is probably apparent, but it is quite a task for a person to be on her
feet throughout proceedings in Committee on demand and I pay tribute to
her for
that. I
pay tribute to the hon. Member for Forest of Dean, who picked arguments
extremely well, and also to the hon. Member for Glasgow, East, who
speaks for the Scottish National party for some of the time.
As we are on
jokes, some members of the Committee might not be aware that, in a
previous life, I was a designer and an illustrator. When I joined the
Liberal Democrats, I did some cartoons about equality and fairness, one
of which showed a high chair with Paddy Ashdown next to it and a
woman—it could have been me—saying, “But, Paddy,
this is not what I meant by a safe seat.” A second cartoon was
about a little child tugging his mother’s skirt saying,
“Mummy, mummy,
why is daddy never here?” to which the mother replied,
“There, there, darling. He is out campaigning every night for
fairness and equality.” I thank the
Committee. Mr.
Tim Boswell (Daventry) (Con): I would not have risen to my
feet, but saying a word on behalf of the Back Benchers collectively
might be appropriate, Mr. Benton, not least because for
various reasons I probably have had more to say than most of
them—not for the first time—and for that I apologise to
the
Committee. I
want to record that everything that has been said from the Front
Benches has been entirely appropriate, accurate and fair, which is not
always the case, but was on this occasion. I include all the
participants, from the Solicitor-General, through my hon. Friend the
Member for Forest of Dean and the rest of our Front-Bench team, to the
Liberal Democrats and those who have served in silence, but with
interest and courtesy, as well as all the rest. It has been very
welcome. I
wish to respond to the exceptionally generous remarks of the
Solicitor-General and of the hon. Member for Hornsey and Wood Green. In
the light of those remarks, I am inclined to think that it is possibly
just as well that I am retiring, because I am not sure that they would
have advanced my parliamentary career. In a sense that does not
matter.
I advert,
although I do so reluctantly, to my comment on the conduct of the Bill
on “The Westminster Hour” on Sunday night—those
who have not heard it can still hear it on iPlayer. I made the point,
without being invidious, about the distinction between those Bills in
which there is a common spirit and a Minister who is prepared to lead
things into improvement, and those that are about doing the press
release, drafting the Bill and so on. The Bill has been one of the
former. It is very much better for Parliament if it can do that. I
still think in a funny and rather old-fashioned way that legislation
matters, that it is better to get it right than half right and that it
is better to talk about it than to leave it
unconsidered. I
have enjoyed the Committee. To finish, my hon. Friend the Member for
Forest of Dean referred to archers this morning and, having a Welsh
wife, I have a certain interest in that profession as well. I recall
that, after a much more contentious Committee on the National Minimum
Wage Bill, I concluded my remarks when I was in his post by referring
to Henry V before Agincourt and
saying: “We
would not have missed it for the world.”—[Official
Report, Standing Committee D, 17 February 1998; c.
1037.] John
Mason (Glasgow, East) (SNP): I thank you, Mr.
Benton, and through you Lady Winterton, for looking after us over the
past 20 Committee sittings. You have managed to keep us from straying
too far, as when we seemed to get bogged down in discussing Scotland in
one of the
debates. The
Committee is only my second Public Bill Committee as I come towards the
end of my first year as a Member. I was extremely impressed by the
Solicitor-General, who handled everything herself; on my previous Bill
Committee, with the hon. Member for Forest of Dean as well, there were
I think four Ministers, who all took turns. I assumed that that was the
norm, so I was
impressed with the Solicitor-General—with her colleagues, too,
with some of whom we had robust debate, but we managed to avoid being
too
personal. I
also thank the hon. Member for Forest of Dean and his colleagues for
their helpfulness. The hon. Member for Oxford, West and Abingdon and I,
in particular, seemed to have a few intellectual jousts or whatever the
word is. However, we managed to keep a reasonable tone throughout the
debate, and discussing some of those issues, including religion and so
on, is
good. The
Bill is extremely good, the vast majority of it my party and I are
supportive of, and we look forward to it reaching the following
stages.
The
Chairman: First, I thank the Minister, the Opposition
spokesmen and all Committee members for the courtesy extended at all
times to the Chair. All the nice remarks will be passed on to Lady
Winterton, Mr. Speaker and David Taylor. Thank you all very
much for
that. I
also thank the learned Clerks and all people who have contributed to
the smooth running of the Committee, which has been interesting. I have
enjoyed it—very informative.
I would like
to conclude with my own appreciation of the hon. Member for Daventry.
As he was speaking and as the Solicitor-General was making her
comments, my mind went back many years ago to my arrival in the House.
I soon became a member of the education team and had the good fortune
to work on a further education Bill, on which the hon. Gentleman was
further education spokesman. I was immediately impressed by his wisdom
and by his contributions to that Committee. That has not changed much
over 18 years. His contribution, which he still makes and which has
been indicated clearly during consideration of the Bill, has been deep,
thought-provoking and positive. I add my compliments to you, sir, and
wish you all the best for the future. You will be a loss, although we
shall still remain politically divided. Thank you
all. Question
put and agreed
to. Bill,
as amended, accordingly to be
reported. 4.30
pm Committee
rose.
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