Enterprise Bill [HL]

My Lords, I will speak very briefly to support the exclusion of the Equality and Human Rights Commission. The noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, has gone through the argument and laid out the case for this exclusion very fully so I will not go over that again, but I want to add one point. Far from imposing extra burdens on business, the Equality and Human Rights Commission does quite a lot to relieve business of burdens by producing things such as guidance and codes of practice that explain the position and help to guide business through the legal maze of discrimination law, making it a good deal easier for business to deal with these issues when they come up. It does not seem appropriate, when that is the function of the Equality and Human Rights Commission and the way that it works, to tie the commission up in the sort of red tape that its work—its codes of practice and guidance and so on—goes quite a long way to ridding business of.