It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Lady Winterton.

I shall speak to amendments 196 and 197, which I hope are complementary to amendment 10, which was moved by my hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean. These amendments serve to round out an earlier stage of the debates that we had on Tuesday, when I asked the Minister for reassurance about whether targeted promotional and marketing activities that involve companies aiming their goods or services at particular groups of people would remain legal, as they always have been. The Minister was able to give some fairly solid and comprehensive reassurances that that was perfectly feasible, providing things were done in a positive rather than a derogatory way.

This pair of amendments seeks to probe the Government’s thinking not on market targeting, but on market access. In our debate last Tuesday, we talked about companies such as Club 18-30, which seeks to  provide holidays to people of a particular age range, or Saga, which seeks to provide holidays to people at the other end of the age range. We clarified that it was perfectly appropriate to target promotional materials at people in the appropriate age range without fear of legal problems.

The follow-up, perhaps slightly harder, question concerns Club 18-30 targeting its promotional materials at people who are 18 to 30, then getting an application from someone who is 50 to go on one of its holidays. Can the company turn down that person on the basis of age? Equally, if Saga gets an application to go on one of its holidays from someone who is 30, is it appropriate—legal—for the company to turn it down?

This does not just apply to the travel industry. The insurance market has been much discussed. A number of organisations have made submissions saying that evidence shows that it is harder to get some kinds of insurance if one is older. Interestingly, Saga has come up with some additional evidence that, although not all insurance companies provide insurance to people who are at the top end of the age range, there are a number of companies, including Saga, that do. According to Saga’s research at least, in well over 90 per cent. of cases, people who had been initially turned down by their normal insurer—presumably because of age—were able to find insurance elsewhere. Therefore, although the individual insurer that they were using might have been unwilling to allow access to their products, or was willing to allow them access only at a much higher price, they were not completely shut out of the insurance market.

The question that we are asking in amendments 196 and 197 is what the Government’s thinking is on where to draw the line. That is important because the Government are seeking in later clauses—I will not try your patience with them at the moment, Lady Winterton, as we will deal with them later—to acknowledge that there are examples of “good discrimination” and “bad discrimination”, to use the terms already used by my hon. Friend. In other words, the Government are seeking to take powers to allow Ministers to declare things to be legal. That causes a great deal of anxiety. Many companies are concerned that their goods and services may be deemed to be illegal until the Minister gets round to declaring them to be okay.

The purpose of the amendments is to take the legal threshold back a step or two to something that—I hope that the Committee will agree—is just anything provided on the basis of public service; surely, that should be provided universally. I also ask the Minister to build up from that foundation and share with us the Government’s thinking on what is an acceptable set of principles to distinguish between good and bad differentiation on the grounds of age and sex.

In the previous debates on market targeting, we mentioned insurance companies such as Sheilas’ Wheels, which aims to provide insurance to women. If Sheilas’ Wheels refused to give me insurance because I am male, would that be illegal? What is the Government’s thinking about the underlying principles? Other examples were mentioned. Today, I can think of gay clubs that might want to exclude heterosexual people. One might think of gyms that operate women-only classes or sessions. There are lots of examples all round.