Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)

My Lords, I hope that the principle that sits behind my probing amendment, like the principle of equal pay for equal or equivalent work, is uncontroversial and therefore that I need not detain the Committee for too long—I am a sort of guest of this Committee, when some noble Lords have been really putting the hard yards in for so long. Over the years, I have been incredibly grateful to discuss my concern about equal pay legislation with a number of Members in this Committee and noble Lords in general. I have been particularly grateful to my noble friend Lady Jones of Whitchurch and her officials, who have been very generous with their time and responded to me by agreeing to consider my proposal as part of their preparations for a more specific Bill—not too long in the future—that will cover these issues. There has been a broad consensus in British politics for some years that there should not be discrimination in pay. We have had the Equal Pay Act since 1970 and successor legislation; I do not believe it has been controversial in party-political terms. That will be 75 years of equal pay legislation in December, and still nowhere near equal pay. My own view is that, right from the beginning, there was a fundamental design fault in the legislation—which was so brilliantly “Made in Dagenham”—because the enforcement mechanism was wanting. I have said before there is no other area of regulation in this country that we take seriously that we would leave to an individual citizen or consumer to enforce for themselves. Imagine school standards, food standards, nuclear safety standards, health and safety standards, environmental standards and so on if the only enforcement mechanism in the legislation was for the individual citizen to investigate the regulatory breach and then, with or without the support of a trade union or an NGO, to sue for themselves. That has been the position for individual workers under equal pay legislation from the very start, and that is problematic. My amendment creates the possibility of the state acting as a backstop to stand behind an individual worker, so that she does not have to go through those ridiculous hoops—which will take years of expensive investigation and legislation—to find out what her colleagues are getting paid, not just for the same job but for equivalent work, with all the complications around that, and then, with or without trade union support, sue her employer. Who wants to do that? It is just not a realistic regulatory enforcement mechanism. In my probing amendment, I suggest that some agency of the state ought to sit behind as a backstop in that investigation and enforcement process. If that were the case, we could help to avoid unnecessary and expensive litigation and the bankruptcy of some local authorities. A state regulator could, for example, investigate a particular employer that had become a concern with a range of regulatory options, including private notices and private conversations, before public conversations and potential enforcement action. Entrenched inequality in pay practice could be nipped in the bud before years transpire and the debts accumulate. I think, having listened to some previous debates on this Bill, that this principle ought to be welcomed on all sides of the Chamber, because it could be good for the business as well as for workers.