Worker Protection (Amendment of Equality Act 2010) Bill

Earl of Leicester Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 24th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Leicester (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my tourism and leisure interests—within those businesses, I have probably 250 employees. I am extremely concerned about the Bill, which will have grave implications for freedom of speech as well as imposing huge compliance costs on Britain’s 1.5 million businesses. It is not an exaggeration to say that it is the most momentous and far-reaching piece of legislation currently before Parliament—yet it has received very little parliamentary scrutiny and provoked almost no debate in the public square. If the Bill were merely concerned with sexual harassment, I would have very few objections to it. Indeed, when it was flagged up to representatives in the hospitality sector, their understanding, without exception, was that the only form of third-party harassment that employers will be liable for if the Bill becomes law is sexual harassment. So there is a lack of understanding because of the lack of debate.

Clause 1 will create liability for third-party harassment of all kinds, not merely sexual harassment. Just as employers are currently liable if they have not taken all reasonable steps to prevent an employee overhearing another employee saying something offensive that relates to a protected characteristic, so they will now be liable if an employee overhears a member of the public saying something offensive. This should alarm any of us concerned with free speech, regulatory overreach and the spread of compliance culture.

If the Bill becomes law, businesses will treat their customers in the same way that they treat their employees, at least in some important aspects. Therefore, just like employees, customers are likely to be bound by formal and binding HR-style rules that govern how they interact with employees, so that the employer can demonstrate that it has taken “all reasonable steps” to prevent third-party harassment and so it can begin to manage the multifarious risks that arise from a legal prohibition against unintentional offence. Being told to use your staff’s preferred gender pronouns would be the tip of the iceberg.

Just earlier this week, I saw on Twitter—and I do not go on there that much these days—an unsavoury incident of a young trans woman filming herself shouting at a young server in a fast-food store. That server was doubtless themselves on the minimum wage. She was accusing him of misgendering her by calling her “sir.” The trans woman had evidently taken offence, but rather than quietly and politely correcting the young server that “he” was in fact a “she”, she was screaming blue murder and making quite a scene. The young worker was certainly harassed and could have a case against his employer, but how could the employer have guessed that this might happen? If they had guessed that this might be an eventuality, they could have instituted some gender recognition training, doubtless at a large cost to the company—and the quality of the training out there is arguable. Witness our own Valuing Everyone equally training here in this House, which was frankly patronising at best. That might have placated 48% of the 18-24 year-olds who believe that people should declare or display their pronouns, but not the remaining 52%, or the vast majority of older people who do not see the need or point of such virtue-signalling.

It is hard to conceive how any Government, least of all a Conservative one, should conclude that the compliance culture of HR departments, with their dogmatic rigidity, unreflective worship of fashionable orthodoxy and complete deadness to nuance and complexity, should be expanded beyond the workplace and into pubs, shops, theatres and sports grounds. Yet that is precisely what this Bill will do.

The Equality Act has chilled the atmosphere in workplaces up and down the country with people living in fear of saying the wrong thing and being reported to HR. That chill is now going to spread beyond the workplace into those places where people spend their leisure time. Is that really what the British people want—to live in a society where, if they are overheard telling a saucy joke or expressing an incorrect opinion, such as saying that they do not think trans women are women, they could be permanently banned from their favourite pub or restaurant? Hugh Osmond, the head of Punch Taverns, said:

“How could we stop a group of people coming into a pub and having an offensive chat in the comer? You may even need extra staff walking around the pub policing conversation. You wouldn’t find rules this strict in China or Russia”.


I question whether the UK’s under-threat pub sector will be able to shoulder the compliance costs and liability that Clause 1 imposes. An industry predominantly made up of small owner-operators, who do not have the resources to deal with this, is already under threat. One reason I voted to leave in the 2016 referendum was that, when we joined the EEC more than 50 years ago, Europe had 33% of world trade. When we voted to leave the EU, its share of trade had fallen to 17%. My take on this is that the EU is effectively legislating itself out of business. Extra-burdensome legislation is the last thing that this country needs as we struggle with the cost of living crisis, the mountain of debt built up as a result of our handling of the Covid pandemic, and inflation. This Bill needs a huge rethink.