Equality Bill [Lords]

Liberal Democrat Members welcome the Bill, although that is not to say that it is perfect by any stretch of the imagination. It was improved during its passage through the other place, and we will work together in Committee to improve it further. A strengthened human rights remit is probably the way to tackle the problems of prejudice and discrimination generally. We have the Equal Opportunities Commission, the Commission for Racial Equality and the Disability Rights Commission, but with the three new strands, it is important that the approach to the problem becomes unified. We need a bottom-up approach, rather than a which-bit-of-legislation-can-we-use-now approach, because that will be the only way of tackling the common problem of multiple, or cross-strand, discrimination. The Fawcett Society produced a report in January called ““Powerless, poor and passed over””, which examined the experiences of black and minority ethnic women. It shows that the experiences of those women are often overlooked because studies focus on either race or gender, but not both. It highlighted the lack of data on gender and ethnicity combined. The report also found that women experiencing domestic violence often had to contact agencies 11 times before they received the help that they needed, but black and minority ethnic women had to contact agencies an average of 17 times. If we are talking about the pay gap, women of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin earned 56 per cent. of the average salary of a white man. There are clearly many problems that must be tackled.