Lord Young of Acton (Con)

My Lords, in moving Amendment 83 I will speak to Amendments 84 to 86 and 88 in this group. I declare my interests as the general secretary of the Free Speech Union and as an employer. As your Lordships know, Clause 20 amends Section 40 of the Equality Act to make employers liable for the harassment of their employees by third parties. Henceforth, they will have to take all reasonable steps to protect their employees from third-party harassment, and if they fail to do so, they could be sued in the employment tribunal. Do not let the proponents of Clause 20 muddy the waters by claiming it will protect workers from sexual harassment by third parties: employers are already liable for third-party sexual harassment thanks to the Worker Protection Act 2023. Where is the evidence that non-sexual third-party harassment is a problem in the workplace? There is none in the final-stage impact assessment. For that, we have to turn to a fact sheet produced by the Office for Equality and Opportunity and the Department for Business and Trade published last year, which says: “For the year ending March 2024, 9.2% of people aged 16 years and over who said they had experienced non-sexual harassment in the last 12 months, reported that they had been harassed by a client or member of the public contacted through work”. But only 5.5% of the respondents in that survey reported experiencing non-sexual harassment, and 9.2% of 5.5% is 0.51%. To be clear, only 0.51% of the respondents in this survey reported experiencing non-sexual third-party harassment in the workplace or through work in the past year. As the Equality and Human Rights Commission said in its parliamentary briefing on this clause ahead of Second Reading: “Evidence of the prevalence of third-party harassment in the workplace, beyond sexual harassment, is limited”. Incidentally, that is also the opinion of the Regulatory Policy Committee.