So – Harriet Harman has launched her Equalities Bill into the political process and it’s really only one issue in it that has caught the media and public eye so far – the proposal to allow a limited degree of positive action in some circumstances when choosing who to employ.

If you believe some of the sensationalist coverage, the world is about to end for white men with discrimination against them about to be legalised left, right and centre. Conservative MP Philip Davies said, for example,

How on earth can [Harriet Harman] justify in an equalities Bill a provision that allows people to be selected solely on the basis of their skin colour or their gender? That is completely and utterly outrageous.

Well, what’s really completely and utterly outrageous is the way Philip Davies has got what is proposed completely wrong. Nowhere do the proposals say that employment purely on the basis of skin colour or gender should be allowed. Nowhere. For all that the proposals actually say are that:

The Bill will extend positive action so that employers can take under-representation into account when selecting between two equally qualified candidates.

That “two equally qualified candidates” is crucial and makes a nonsense of the distorted fear tactics from (some) Conservatives claiming that suddenly white men will get dumped for worse women / ethnic minorities.

When you’ve got two equally qualified people for a job, you have to choose somehow between them. We shouldn’t be naïve about what happens at the moment – such as how who know who, who went to school with who, and so on often is using to pull favours in such situations. All these proposals would do is to make it legal to use a rather more appropriate criteria.

Take a primary school with an overwhelming number of female teachers. If you have two equally qualified applicants for a vacancy, why not let the school – if it wishes (and note, these proposals in the bill are only permissive – they don’t force people to use them) it could decide to prefer a man, so that the young children get a better mix of male and female role models.

I think it’s right that the school should be able to decide whether or not to do this, making the decision based on its own circumstances and needs – and I’m damn sure it’s a better way of doing things than letting personal links and favouritism make the judgement in such situations but saying the question of mix of male and female role models is banned from consideration.

Today’s the day! Or should have been. The Equalities Bill ”statement’ today in the House of Common chamber came after loads of leaks and media on the subject.

I can only assume that Ms Harman wanted the news agenda to herself – avoiding opposition criticism. Which is a shame – as the media have made great hay with the bit which will allow an employer who at interview has several equally qualified applicants – give the job to the one they feel fills a gap in the make up of their workforce. So – for example – if there was under-representation of male teachers in a primary school – and a woman and man both were equally qualified to get the job – the employer could decide to give the job to the man to improve the under-represented groups representation – without being sued. That’s the point. Previously it was against the law.

This is the bit that (in garbled and misleading form) grabbed the media attention, but the media have pretty much ignored the really good bit – that at the eleventh hour the Government included tackling age discrimination both in extending the equality duty on the public sector but also applying it to the provision of goods and services. Hurrah!

This is something that should have happened years and years ago – and you might ask – what changed the Government’s mind at the last moment? My current theory is – given that Labour may not be the Government when the costs of implementation come in – they decided to get it right as a sort of legacy – a farewell gift to equality and fairness. Well – I don’t know really – but hurrah! Older people have had the worst of treatment in the equality agenda – so three cheers!

However, the hawks in the cabinet have clearly won when it comes to tackling the private sector over their equality practises. The Government has baulked at any mandatory pay audits – and Harriet did not answer me when I asked at what point in the voluntary, softly softly approach to asking companies to publish their wages for employees so we can see the truth, the measures would become compulsory.

And there was lots more – but over the next seven months – we will be pushing the agenda as hard as we can. And I expect the Government to include many of our ‘asks’!

More news on what the bill is likely to say over on politics.co.uk

Continuing my mini-series on the forthcoming Single Equalities Bill and what the final Act should contain, I do not think the courts that deal with discrimination have enough powers to really put an end, or even significantly dent, discrimination.

Since claims are brought by an individual, the courts can only look at what wrong that individual has actually suffered and seek to compensate them for this through damages.

Whilst the court discrimination awards are unlimited and can include ‘hurt to feeling’, in certain cases this quite simply isn’t enough and amounts to no more than a small financial slap on the wrist. I am thinking about real systematic discrimination that is low level and done on a large scale – say for example – a chain of hotels that will only let gay couples have rooms on the top floor for example.

The narrow, direct damage suffered by the individuals is relatively small. The ‘hurt to feelings’ award might bump it up a bit, but the hotel could make a calculated decision that it could afford it.

What if in a case like this the court could award punitive damages? When making an award for damages, it could look beyond the individual in front of it and consider how many people might be affected and whether the defendant has done anything to change its ways.

And say if on the third or fourth case against this chain, the court decided a stronger message needed to be made.

Case law is developing in this directly with the advent of exemplary damages, but this is only in a limited set of circumstances (when the defendant is an agent of government or when the defendant has made a calculated risk that it is more profitable to discriminate – which is not the case is the example I gave as some might discriminate even if it is unprofitable).

I’m increasingly of the view that we should accelerate the pace of change, and that therefore this aspect of the current law needs to be looked at. The Single Equalities Bill will certainly provide an opportunity to move matters along in this regard.

The long-awaited Single Equalities Bill will shortly be eating up much of my time in Parliament as it wends its way through the legislative process and it falls slap bang in the middle of my job in the Liberal Democrat Shadow Cabinet on youth and equalities.

The Bill represents real opportunity. I think I’m right in saying that when is comes to equality legislation there have been nine separate Acts, four European Directives and countless other regulations spanning four decades.

To say discrimination legislation is a bit bitty and fragment is an understatement. Therefore a new Bill will be a simplifying and tidying up undertaking. However, for me the Bill must be more than mere gardening exercise, it must tackle some of the inequalities between these various laws that lead to unequal treatment.

There are numerous anomalies that have been a product of this piecemeal, almost organic evolution of legislation. From the Government’s statements and what I have heard in the House of Commons, I would expect most, if not all, of these oddities to be corrected.

Moving beyond that, the Bill offers the chance to achieve a three-fold success: firstly – to make discrimination more difficult; secondly – to make discrimination legislation more effective; thirdly – to insist that any exceptions to this Act are on the face of the legislation.

If these three things are not in the Bill – then we will be tabling amendments to these effects.

Of course we wait with baited breadth to see which side the Government comes down on some important points. The discrepancy in the definition of a comparator between Equal Pay Act and other Acts certainly needs sorting. The Liberal Democrats would hope to see the abolition of the need for a real comparator. We believe this would do more to accelerate equality by making it easier for an individual to bring equal pay claims.

I also believe we should apply imaginative – and even edgy – thinking across all three areas. The Government goes through criminal justice bills like it does hot dinners. Sadly, inequality does not get the same attention – so we should be willing to be imaginative in making the most of the options the Bill will present. I’ve blogged already about employment ideas – and will blog about more shortly!