I always proceed with care. I am not afraid of that sort of gibe. We could get ourselves in an awful tangle if we start following the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, down this route. It is a familiar theme that he runs with all the time whenever he gets close to something he does not want to do. We must all be careful not to have too many loads on us. We can worry too much about form and not enough about content and I want to challenge him on that. I understand what the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, is saying on this, but these bodies are, if you stand a little apart from the close intricacies of how they operate, performing a public function, a function that is valued by the public. I have said already that they are public bodies but not public sector bodies, but as the noble Lord said, there is an issue about FoI and the implications around that. We have got to find a balancing point on that.
Let us park the philosophy for a second and return to the substance of the original amendment. Our Amendment 111 is a probing amendment to try to get a little further on this because I could not reconcile the drafting in the original Bill with what I thought would be the sorts of issues reflective of the health or otherwise of the sector and would be required as mandatory transparency conditions. The obvious point about using
the existing equality legislation occurred to others who are more versed in these issues than I am. I tabled a probing amendment on those lines to try to get that out and it has revealed an interesting topic. I do not know where we go with this. I understand the issues that the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, gave us an insight into and which we will need to reflect on.
Three things occur to me. It was rightly pointed out that our Amendment 111 would delete the socioeconomic background requirement in Clause 9(3). There was a reason for our madness on that point in that it seemed a wide-ranging issue on which to request transparency. We are talking about mandatory transparency and socioeconomic background is a term of art, not a term of science, although one could get close to it from a number of directions. It is so imprecise as not to have a particular value. Moreover, ethnicity is not the same as race and the gender of individuals is a multiple, complex issue. These issues are raised within the Equality Act and we have to be much more subtle about how we approach them. I was looking more at the detail and working back from that.
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I do not object to the mandatory transition policy; it is right, and there should be a minimum core of information made available. I find it extraordinary that disability is not listed as one of the issues given that it is not only a material factor in many people’s decision about whether to go to university but an issue for which the Government—until recently at least—had significant sums available. Somehow those sums have not survived through to the current day but very large amounts were taken up under the 2010 reforms and brought forward in a way that gave specific advantages to places such as the Open University, which has a terrific record of encouraging applications from students from disadvantaged areas, many of whom would have fitted into the protected characteristics.
I align myself with the points made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness. He is absolutely right on this. There is a judgment here to be made about how we do what we do, but there is no sense in setting off on completely the wrong track. If this clause is to work, it must reflect better where we currently are in relation to the law of the land, and the Equality Act is a very good starting point.