Member

I will respond to a couple of the points that the Minister made. I am not sure I quite understood the point about the three-strike clause. She said that, if they replicated the three-strike caveat that was originally in the third-party harassment clause in the Equality Act as enacted, it would place an undue burden on employers. But when we met—she referred to our meeting earlier—one of her objections to caveating the third-party harassment clause in that way was that, between 2010 and 2013, only two cases for third-party harassment were brought before the employment tribunal. It sounds to me as though she wants more cases to be brought before the employment tribunal, which would place a greater burden on employers, not a lower one. Caveating the third-party harassment clause in that way—in the way it was caveated by the Labour Government in 2010—would reduce the burden on employers. It seems an odd ambition for the Government to want more cases to be brought before the employment tribunal and to regard that as the metric by which the success of this legislation will be measured, when the employment tribunal is so overwhelmed that there is a backlog of almost 50,000 cases.