UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE
To be published as HC 732-ii

HOUSE OF COMMONS

ORAL EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE THE

Home Affairs Committee

Work of the Home Office - Equalities

Tuesday 22 March 2011

Ben Summerskill, Dr Marc Bush and LEANDER NECKLES

Evidence heard in Public Questions 86 - 115

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

Oral Evidence

Taken before the Home Affairs Committee

on Tuesday 22 March 2011

Members present:

Keith Vaz (Chair)

Mr James Clappison

Dr Julian Huppert

Steve McCabe

Alun Michael

Bridget Phillipson

Mark Reckless

Mr David Winnick

________________

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Ben Summerskill, Chief Executive, Stonewall, Dr Marc Bush, Head of Public Policy, Scope, and Leander Neckles, Board Member, Equanomics-UK, gave evidence.

Q86 Chair: Could I call the Committee to order and refer all those present to the Register of Members’ Interests, where the interests of all members of this Committee are noted.

I welcome our witnesses. This is the Committee’s inquiry into the work of the Home Office with specific reference to equalities. We have taken evidence from the Chair of the EHRC and we will be taking evidence later from the Minister on this and other matters.

Mr Summerskill, Dr Bush, Ms Neckles, welcome. Can I begin by asking you, Ms Neckles, your view on the Government’s overall strategy as far as equality is concerned. Is it better than that of the last Government? Is it a continuation? Do you have concerns?

Leander Neckles: We have profound concerns. We think that we welcome the overall strategy that says that equalities are at the heart of the Government’s agenda. Our problem is, particularly from a race equality perspective, that we fail to see evidence of that. Let me give you an example. We, as a coalition of BME organisations, wrote to DCLG, who we understand lead on race equality, six months ago-in October. We finally had the first meeting on 17 March. The Minister seemed to think that the promotion of race equality was actually about integration and explained to us that he was going to send us an integration strategy that we could comment on. We believe there are profound differences between race equality and integration. If DCLG and the Minister, Andrew Stunell, are leading on race equality, it would be good if they actually had a framework for engaging with BME organisations, if we could see evidence that there was any work across government about the promotion of race equality, and if there was evidence of leadership generally, as well as the content of the Equality Strategy, which we have concerns about.

Q87 Chair: Yes, thank you. What about from Stonewall’s point of view, Mr Summerskill?

Ben Summerskill: I think, in fairness, we wouldn’t make a distinction between Governments. It is like choosing between your children. But we are crystal clear that the very fact there is a published strategy, both for equality across the piece and in fact around lesbian, gay and bisexual issues, is a good thing. We are not yet in a position to say that very much of what has been promised has been delivered, but I would say, and I think it is important to say, that on a couple of issues-asylum is one of them and homophobic bullying in schools is another-the Government have taken specific and quite significant steps forward. We are hugely appreciative of those, but they are steps towards hard practical outcomes, which again we feel completely comfortable with, precisely because Ministers and others can be challenged on whether they are ultimately delivering what they promised to do.

Q88 Chair: Dr Bush?

Dr Bush: Similarly, we have a kind of mixed picture on the Government’s approach to equalities. We welcome the focus that widens beyond just legislative protections. However, we are quite concerned that existing legislative protections are not quite established. For example, quite a few Equality Act provisions are still outstanding that we think effectively would create greater equality for disabled people and young people-for instance the school provisions on auxiliary aids and equipment. Also, we have a bit of concern about the recent publication of the consultation on specific duties, which I think we might return to later so I shan’t say too much now.

Q89 Chair: What about the spending cuts that are being proposed? Will that affect any of your organisations? Dr Bush?

Dr Bush: Yes, the spending cuts affect not only our organisations but all of the disabled people we interact with quite substantially. We have a real concern that the spending cuts will undermine the progress of disabled people’s equality. Local authorities are going to have significant cuts within their local resources to provide for work on equality issues but also to provide the key services that disabled people need in order to claim their own equality, such as social care and other disability services.

One of our mains concerns centres on the fact that there seems to be a transfer of risk around equality and responsibility from the Government to the individual. That is why, for instance, in the Government’s Equality Strategy and around the cuts, the conditionality falls on that individual but falls away from the local authority or government.

Q90 Chair: What about Mr Summerskill?

Ben Summerskill: In response to the specific question whether spending cuts will affect our organisation, we don’t take public funding from government as a matter of policy. We rely largely on individual supporters, so we are not in a position to say that cuts will impact on us. There are certainly some lesbian, gay and bisexual service delivery organisations that will be impacted. We are always concerned to focus anything we say on hard evidence. I am not clear that those sorts of organisations will be impacted more than any other by the spending cuts. We are always slightly anxious about sensing that one cohort of people are being picked on, when in fact it is the entire voluntary sector.

Q91 Chair: Ms Neckles?

Leander Neckles: We as an organisation, Equanomics, do not receive funding, but the research into BME organisations, the initial research by Runnymede, suggests there will be a disproportionate impact on black and minority ethnic communities by virtue of the fact that BME individuals are disproportionately employed in the public sector, by virtue of the fact that BME organisations generally have smaller budgets and, therefore, a cut to their budget is likely to undermine the existence of the organisation, and by virtue of the fact that BME communities are disproportionately represented in the unemployment figures-double the unemployment rates and so on. So we will be particularly hard hit by cuts in public sector budgets and the other changes that are going on. There will be a double whammy in terms of greater demand for services that no longer are provided by the public sector or voluntary and community sector.

Q92 Bridget Phillipson: Do you agree and are you concerned that the equalities remit within the Home Office appears to focus disproportionately on gender issues?

Leander Neckles: We would not say that it focuses disproportionately on gender issues. We think that there is a structural anomaly-how can you have a government equalities office that does not focus on all areas of equalities and how can you have a Minister focusing on equality but only some areas of equality? Then it is somebody else’s job and then, when race isn’t somebody else’s job, it is nobody’s job. There is no strategic approach.

Our concern is the lack of coherence, particularly if you are wanting to look at issues of intersectionality, which we thought the Equality Act would strengthen, recognising that there are black women, there are black disabled people, there are gay disabled people, there are gay black and disabled people. The Equality Act provided a framework for looking at those issues of intersectionality. If it is distributed here, there and everywhere, how do you bring those strands together in a coherent way? You don’t.

Q93 Bridget Phillipson: Do you think the Home Office has been good in the past and do you have any concerns for the future about how the Home Office will listen to the different groups that you represent in formulating policy?

Leander Neckles: In terms of race, we have profound concerns. A case in point is the consultation or lack thereof around stop and search; stop and search is a key issue in terms of black and minority ethnic communities. It doesn’t take a degree to work out that one. We were particularly concerned that the consultation was, effectively, closed. Our organisations only heard about it because one of the organisations invited to participate invited us to participate. We see this as a development that is unfortunate in the extreme. If the Government are committed to transparency and accountability, some processes like consultative processes and the code on consultation actually matter. Sometimes process is important.

Q94 Bridget Phillipson: Could I ask the other witnesses the same question and just to touch on the previous question on the remit?

Dr Bush: Yes, I will answer both. I think it is slightly different in the disability context in that we have the Office for Disability Issues and a Minister attached to that office. However, our concerns are mainly around its enforcement powers and its effectiveness in bringing across government ideas and strategies on disability that can be implemented. Over the years, we have seen successive strategies on disability to try to work across Government Departments and in the main they have tended to fall down at implementation stage. We have just had the last strategy from the last Government scrapped and there is a new disability strategy coming out.

Our concern is how does the Government Equalities Office work closely with the Office for Disability Issues to make sure, first, that there is cross-governmental commitment to disability as expressed throughout a lot of the Coalition’s programme, and secondly that intersectionality can be realised across a Government.

Ben Summerskill: I have to say we don’t get quite as angst-ridden as some people do about where equalities sit in the machinery of government, because it is a bit like who is the Secretary of State or the weather. First, we do not have much influence over it and, secondly, there are some delivery models for equality works in which, if equality is placed in various different places within a large organisational delivery framework, you get better outcomes than you would if it was all in exactly the same place.

Probably, the most important issue in terms of government is the leadership that comes from the top. That is reflecting both on this Government and the last Government. You could have a range of perfectly competent junior Ministers dealing with these issues across Government, but unless you have a Secretary of State or someone very senior driving it you are probably not going to see the sorts of outcomes I think many people in this room would want to see.

Q95 Dr Huppert: Just a small point: between you, you speak for a range of different groups. It occurs to me that a small but very marginalised group is people who are transgender, who do suffer a huge amount of bullying, ill-treatment and so forth. I have a number of them in Cambridge, I am pleased to say. Do you think they are adequately represented? Do you think there are people speaking up for their interests? What do we do to encourage such organisations to develop?

Leander Neckles: We have worked with Press for Change, for example, and the Equality and Diversity Forum involves a range of voluntary and community organisations representing a range of interests. I know that one of our partner organisations has worked on a range of transgender issues with organisations representing that sector.

I think that possibly some of the intersectionality issues across transgender have not even begun to be addressed yet, because we haven’t addressed the issues in terms of trans-people. While the legislative framework is an improvement on what it was, it doesn’t protect all trans-people from discrimination, so there is still scope for change there.

Ben Summerskill: We would certainly say clearly that the community infrastructure around trans-people is very fragile indeed and often quite divided. There seem to be an awful lot of very small organisations. In terms of practical things that Governments have done, the Department of Health, for example, has recognised that this is a separate and specific equalities issue that involves separate and specific policy issues and prescriptions. That is probably one of the most effective ways of helping move the needle.

Dr Bush: Could I just briefly say that I think it is a situation that befalls all small organisations in getting their voice heard and being supported by Government.

Q96 Mr Winnick: The Equality and Human Rights Commission, as we know, was formed in 2007. Mr Summerskill, you had some difficulties. You resigned, didn’t you? You resigned from the commission.

Ben Summerskill: Along with a number of other commissioners, I did, yes.

Q97 Mr Winnick: I don’t particularly want to go over past history. Was it a matter of policy or of differences in personality or a combination of the two?

Ben Summerskill: Certainly, in my own case, this is in the public domain. I felt unable, as chair of the audit committee, to give undertakings to the Secretary of State that the commission’s affairs were being conducted with appropriate probity.

Q98 Mr Winnick: Okay, let’s leave it on that basis. Sticking with you, Mr Summerskill, do you think the commission is doing what it should be doing as regards gay people, bearing in mind you are the chief executive of the organisation?

Ben Summerskill: It has started doing some of the things that we wanted for it to do.

Q99 Mr Winnick: What is it not doing?

Ben Summerskill: I would be keen to say, for example, that some important test cases have been taken. I think it is important to be positive. In some areas, such as the delivery of its helpline, there seems to be very little evidence that it has been servicing lesbian, gay and bisexual people who, let’s not forget, are actually funding that helpline. They are not just users or potential users. In some of the inherited areas of grant-giving or grant-making-when I say "inherited", I mean inherited from the three legacy commissions-I am not sure there is evidence of a strategic oversight of how those grants are being used to deliver specific outcomes around the country that make a real difference to people’s lives. Those are one or two of the areas where I am not sure there is evidence that things are quite as good as they might be.

Q100 Mr Winnick: Yes, the bad news, the three of you might be interested to know, is that we have just been notified by the Home Secretary, or the Chair has, that the Government have decided to stop funding the commission’s provision of its helpline and grants programme from the end of March next year. That is not good news.

As far as the disabled are concerned, what would you say, Dr Bush?

Dr Bush: There are a couple of issues there. We had quite a strong commission, the Disability Rights Commission, which was the legacy commission to the EHRC. In bringing the strands together, we welcome the opportunity to look across strands and look at how we forward equality issues. Similar to Ben, we do have some concerns about how the EHRC has moved forward. However, I think some of it has been down to the extent to which it can display its enforcement powers, and that needs to be looked at in the reform. Also, we do welcome the new focus or the greater focus on preventative work that the EHRC could do.

However, I think there are core things that the EHRC should be doing and needs to be supported to do so that it can support disabled people in society. That is within keeping legislation under review, but also making sure that it can take and facilitate test cases that really explore gaps in the discrimination legislation.

Just to flag lastly, the close of the helpline, while there are problems with the way the helpline operates, the total closure will have a significant impact on disabled people and organisations for disabled people, mainly because when they do face discrimination they do use that helpline. Also, the Government’s welfare reforms will have a significant impact on the number of people who will need to access both legal advice and rights advice.

Q101 Mr Winnick: Last but certainly not least by any possible standards, ethnic minorities?

Leander Neckles: As everybody has indicated, the EHRC had a difficult birth. It was no easy feat to take on the responsibilities of three pre-existing commissions, human rights, and three new equality strands at that stage, expanded now by the Equality Act. We think, though, that there were strengths and there have been strengths, including the triennial review; good research; legal cases; and some inquiries-the inquiry into meat factories and migrants was particularly strong and the inquiry into the pre-enforcement action taken in relation to stop and search and police forces in that area was strong.

For the future, though, we want to echo what my colleagues have stated. Strong regulatory and enforcement function are absolutely pivotal. Advice around the law and guidance and strategic liaison, we think have been a weakness. There was a disability committee. We don’t know how effective that committee was, but we didn’t have a race committee. In the restructuring of the EHRC, we would like to see some equality around the structures for engaging with communities.

Q102 Chair: That was promised, was it not, on the Floor of the House of Commons?

Leander Neckles: I am not quite sure what happened in the end. Well, what happened in the end was we didn’t get it.

Chair: But it was promised by Ministers because-

Leander Neckles: I will have to go back and check the research, but I know that we argued strongly.

Q103 Chair: Well, Diane Abbott and I extracted a promise from the previous Government that they would set up a race committee. You never got it?

Leander Neckles: We never got it. Although Simon Woolley has done as good a job as possible as the race champion, it is impossible to locate within one individual responsibilities for communicating with communities. It is a structural issue. We also want proper consultation on the restructuring of the EHRC. We don’t want a three-week or a five-week consultation. We want a proper consultation and oversight, we hope, by this Committee.

Q104 Alun Michael: I wanted to take up one specific point. I don’t have an interest to declare, but I should, in the interests of transparency, say that as deputy Home Secretary I was involved in setting up the inquiry into the death of Stephen Lawrence. The previous and current Governments have been moving away from the accountability measures for stop and search that were put in place. The argument, as I understand it, is that they were overly bureaucratic, which one can have some sympathy with. Given that those recording procedures did not seem to lead to an increased proportionality in stop and search, is there a better way of tackling that issue?

Leander Neckles: First of all, we are profoundly concerned about the changes in recording stop and search. If you have no evidence of who exactly has been stopped, how do you know whether there is disproportionality or not? We welcome the Met’s consultation about whether to keep the stop and account records that they already have because, even though they are no longer required by PACE, they are in fact required, in our view, to comply with the public sector equality duty. If we require data and transparency, and you do not have the data, how do you know what is happening? The second issue is what to do about disproportionality, because even if you do not record who is being stopped, the fact that they are still being stopped will not go away.

We think that the EHRC’s Stop and Think report and the work of StopWatch could add an important contribution to looking at how to move forward. But remember, disproportionality in stop and search was reported before Scarman, so we are talking about 1981 and before. We only had the evidence when we started recording from 1995 onwards. We think it is problematic that recording may stop and we may have a patchwork approach as different forces decide what to do with respect to stop and account.

Q105 Alun Michael: Following on from that, what about the proposal in the Protection of Freedoms Bill to-effectively as I understand it-get rid of the power to stop and search without suspicion under section 44 of the Terrorism Act and replace it with alternative powers?

Leander Neckles: We are not expert on this, but Liberty’s advice is that that particular proposal is good, but their concern is the other provisions that would allow you to stop and search. If you wanted further evidence, we could provide further evidence on that matter.

Q106 Mr Clappison: Could I put this question to Dr Bush. Last year, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary published a very critical report about antisocial behaviour, which revealed a pattern of repeat antisocial behaviour and said that many of the victims of repeat antisocial behaviour were disabled people. Many people feel this is part of an emerging problem that has been with us possibly for a long time. What else would you like to see done about this and do you think enough of it is seen as and dealt with as hate crime?

Dr Bush: To answer your question directly, no, I don’t think it is dealt with as hate crime. I think that is mainly because we do not really have an accurate picture of what disability hate crime looks like in the UK. There are key factors that lead to under-reporting or under-awareness of disability hate crime. One of them is disabled people’s confidence and understanding of the experiences they are having. We would like more awareness-raising about the experiences that people are having on a day-to-day basis, which may look like antisocial behaviour or low forms of harassment, but escalate over a period of time towards hate crime.

On the flip side, there is a very low awareness of such crimes amongst police forces. For instance, in 2009, only seven of 44 police forces in England and Wales reported three or less hate crimes against disabled people, which we know is a figure that is way too low, when you look at cases like Fiona Pilkington in 2009, and more recently David Askew, whose family reported 88 separate incidents over six years. Beyond the awareness and understanding and the under-reporting, there is a real problem of the failure of the systems at a local level. It is because local agencies have a real discrepancy in understanding of their responsibility to prevent hate crime, and of what they should be doing once some antisocial behaviour or harassment occurs. We are pleased to see that eight police forces are taking a multi-agency approach. We have always said that there are other social factors involved in this, including appropriate housing, disabled people’s social isolation and access to local services, so joining up of police forces with other local services is a first key indicator in moving forward.

However, I must say that we are slightly concerned about progress to date, because it has been suggested that the recommendations that came under the last hate crime action plan may not be implemented in full.

Q107 Mr Clappison: So does more need to be done on this front?

Dr Bush: Definitely.

Q108 Dr Huppert: Following on from the thing about policing, I have a question for Dr Bush and Ms Neckles. I will have one for Mr Summerskill shortly. We are talking about new police accountability regimes with the introduction of the Police and Crime Commissioners and Police and Crime Panels. You have both expressed concerns about how these arrangements will take account of minority voices. How can this best be addressed, given the changes that are likely to happen?

Dr Bush: I am happy to go first, because my answer is probably quite brief. It relates to what I was saying about joining up at a local level. Our main concern is that there do not seem to be any safeguards to make sure that local action is taken on issues that seem invisible within a local community, such as disability hate crime. We want to see, through the reform of policing, a real focus on groups that may not have a strong voice and whose issues are routinely ignored by local authorities. Linked to that, a solution could be not only raising awareness and making sure that is written into the strategy but making sure there is a greater role for local disabled people’s organisations and other minority groups’ organisations, so that there is a voice at the very heart of these structures.

Q109 Dr Huppert: Do you think it might be quite helpful to have a single point of contact such as a commissioner with whom local disabled groups, for example, could establish a relationship?

Dr Bush: Yes, in the sense that there is then a name and a face to the bureaucracy, but I think, on the flipside, it takes more than one person to make this a reality. To echo a point that Leander made, when something is everyone’s responsibility, it soon becomes no one’s responsibility, but when it is one person’s responsibility, usually nothing gets done. So I think it is making sure there is enough of a local join-up in those multi-agency approaches to make sure action can be taken.

Leander Neckles: We have concerns about the role, which might be a politicised role, of a police commissioner. At the moment, if you have a chief constable and they fail to do their job or they step over the boundaries of what is deemed to be political activity, you can eventually dismiss them. It might be quite difficult, but you can do. If you elect somebody for a particular term, what do you do if you have fundamental concerns about their approach? What happens when the local Gypsy and Traveller group moves in and local community sentiment is entirely against those groups and they are perceived in a certain way and targeted in a certain way? We are concerned that some of the issues, particularly around race, become very fraught at local level. Therefore, independence and objectivity are absolutely pivotal. If the Government do decide to move forward with this then they are going to have to consider how to build in those issues of independence, objectivity and so on. Our concern is that, in a sense, it is a conflict. It is a conflict in just the structures that you are establishing, so we are quite concerned.

Q110 Dr Huppert: Can I ask Mr Summerskill a question on a slightly different issue? The EHRC’s triennial report talked about people in homosexual relationships suffering a high level of domestic abuse-more than in non-homosexual relationships. I think the predecessor commission discussed the issue of specialist support for gay victims of domestic violence, but most of the discussion about domestic violence tends to be focus on violence perpetrated by men against women. Are you concerned that more should be done on this issue or is there something that we are just not aware of that could provide some support for such people?

Ben Summerskill: If I may just say first, because I think this cuts across, that we have exactly the same anxieties about the inadequacy of reporting of hate crime as other people have expressed.

I think the triennial review cites Stonewall research, which found that one in four lesbians had been the victim of domestic violence. It clearly is an issue, if I have the figures right, at about the same level as in the majority population. The only thing that is sometimes overlooked is that a third of those women say that it is men who are the perpetrators. They can be people, for example, who have been married and may discover that they are lesbian or take a different approach to their relationship. It is a perfect example of an area of public service of which delivery is not as efficient as it should be, partly, one suspects, because one of the articulations of prejudice against minority groups historically has simply been to make them invisible.

Q111 Dr Huppert: Are there specialist services at the moment?

Ben Summerskill: There are some.

Q112 Dr Huppert: Are they getting enough Government support or support from other sources?

Ben Summerskill: In the current climate, that would be a subjective response. I think they are not necessarily receiving as much support as they should. The only thing I would say-we would say it across the board; we say it in relation to policing, for example-is that we are still crystal clear that in the medium to long term people from a minority community should not have to go to a specific service because they should be served properly by mainstream services.

Exactly the same is true, if I may say, of policing in general. The current model that has been developed to support lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities on policing issues, which we currently support, is that I will go into Kennington police station, where there are 300 officers, and they will say to me, "Thank you for coming, Mr Summerskill. If you would like to come in next Wednesday morning we will arrange for you to be interviewed by an officer who has been trained to be polite to you", an LGBT liaison officer. Now, I am sorry to say, our view is that in the long term every single one of the 300 Metropolitan Police staff at Kennington police station should have been trained to be polite to every single one of the people who pay their salaries. We completely accept and support specifically tailored provision as an interim measure, but we do believe that these services, and indeed the Government who fund them, should be setting strategic targets that all of the people who fund those services should be treated fairly in the medium to long term.

Q113 Steve McCabe: I think this is a question particularly to Mr Summerskill. As you probably know, the freedoms Bill has certain proposals in it that historical convictions for what might be described as homosexual acts should be disregarded in the future, but I understand the mechanism for this is that it is done through application to the Secretary of State. I wondered if you had a view on whether this was the most appropriate way to deal with this issue or if you had any alternative suggestions.

Ben Summerskill: Can I just say first of all, that we completely welcome this proposal. We are delighted it is happening. It is hugely important to a number of, obviously on the whole, older gay men, not only who still wish to work but often who still wish to volunteer and are constrained from applying to do so because they have a historic conviction. It is not for me to explain the difficulties facing officials, because Ministers will have lots of them coming up with strings of difficulties every afternoon, but one of the difficulties that has been understandably identified in this particular instance is historic offences involving sex between people who were then below the age of consent. It is often not the caricature of an older man and a younger man. It is quite often two people who were under the age of consent, but the records do not always stipulate the age of the people concerned because the offence was simply sex with someone under 21. The difficulty that we hope can be unpicked, but we are not clear about the way to do it, is that you could not actually cancel or remove all those records because, of course, some of them would be perfectly proper cases of coercion or sex with someone who was under the age at which sex was unlawful.

Q114 Mr Clappison: This is more of a comment as somebody who was a young barrister involved in the administration of justice in cases that I see here were under section 71 of the Sexual Offences Act-sexual activity in a public lavatory. It was the opinion of many people in the legal system involved in those cases at the time that they were unpleasant in themselves and a ridiculous waste of time. Looking back on it, that seems to be even more the case from our perspective today.

Ben Summerskill: I am old enough to remember the days when Metropolitan Police officers used to stand around in public lavatories in the middle of the night waiting to have their bottoms pinched. We would be the first to say we are delighted if they are now focusing on slightly more pressing matters.

Q115 Chair: Thank you very much for coming in to give evidence. Obviously, this Committee will now take a greater interest in these issues because they are now part of our remit as they now rest with the Home Office. I am sure that we will have the opportunity of seeing you again. If there is anything else that you feel will be of help to the Committee in respect of our current inquiry, please do not hesitate to write to us or, if you want to clarify any of the evidence that you have given.

Leander Neckles: There is just one issue. It is the reopening of the consultation by the Home Office/GEO on the public sector equality duties-the specific equality duties. This is a case in point on how not to do consultations. You conduct a consultation from August 2010 to January. You produce draft regulations. The EHRC produces guidance based on those draft regulations, which people then act on. Three weeks before the public sector duties are due to come into force, you say, "By the way, we are now reopening the consultation on the specific duties. It is going to last for five weeks. We are now putting forward completely different proposals, but based on the same principles that we used when we consulted in August".

We have profound concerns, and we hope that this Committee will raise this issue with the Government. We are concerned that this will undermine the continuity of the new public sector duties that will come into force on 6 April, but without the support of any specific equality duties.

Chair: That is very helpful. We certainly will take that on board when we write to the Home Secretary and we prepare our report. Ms Neckles, Mr Summerskill, Dr Bush, thank you very much for coming this morning.