Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)

In the Mirror newspaper last week, Clause 20 hit the headlines. Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner claimed that reforms protecting employees from third party harassment would not chill free speech, and she rubbished claims that innocent workplace banter is the target. She said: “Nobody should be abused while doing their job, but we’ve seen a horrific rise in violent abuse and harassment of shop workers and other public facing staff”. She went on to describe those of us worried about the unintended consequences of this clause as resorting to “spreading made-up nonsense”. I feel the need to counter this misinformation because I fear Angela Rayner may herself be influenced by misinformation about what is in her own Bill. I was especially alarmed when the TUC general secretary Paul Nowak told the newspaper that those of us opposing Clause 20 are “insulting people’s intelligence by pretending that protecting workers from harassment is the same as banning banter”. But actually, it is—and that is not my decision. It is present in the way equality law has been interpreted in employment tribunals, as has just been described, associating harassment with banter. Whatever the Government, Angela Rayner or the TUC think is in the Bill, it does not set out what constitutes harassment or, rather, what does not. Therefore, in Committee, the Minister directed us to the definitions of harassment used in equality legislation, which is then interpreted in employment tribunals. It is important to note that under the Equality Act, as interpreted, harassment includes indirect harassment, which, as the EHRC guidance states, can include the following: spoken words, jokes, written words and posts on social media, physical expressions and gestures and, yes, banter. As we have heard, employment tribunals hear many cases relating to workplace banter, with 57 cases in 2024. If we look at human resources literature, we see that it is full of advice to employers on managing banter in the workplace between their employees. One horrendous suggestion put out to employers was to monitor conversations and attempt to pick up or pre-empt any problems. Another suggestion was to send people on—wait for it—appropriate conversation training sessions. I have just been sent the details of a consultant—there is always a consultant behind all this—who is an inclusive language and banter specialist and runs workshops at £495 a shot. One of his first workshops is “What does the term transgender mean to you?”—I will not say what it means to me out loud or I might get done by the banter police. Anyway, cisgender is a term that I do not think we want to be put into the hands of the banter police. We are not raising this issue to cause a fuss. The problem is that it is in the Bill. I have always argued against this broad and elastic definition of harassment; it is problematic because it undermines free speech, as I have made the case for many times in this House and in Committee. I also want to emphasise that it risks trivialising genuine cases of harassment and diluting the impact of genuine anti-harassment policies that require serious attention.