Mr. Christopher Bowes:

The issue of definitions has been looked at over a number of years and a huge amount of work has been done on it. As we said in our submission, there is a very strong, carefully considered Private Members' Bill on it. The approach of having a non-exhaustive list of grounds that indicates a person belongs to an identifiable social or geographical group is enough to capture this idea of socioeconomic disadvantage. Another element of it is that it is defined not as socioeconomic status but as socioeconomic disadvantage. In this way it is targeted at groups that suffer discrimination, rather than having some form of privilege, on the basis of their socioeconomic status, which is another very important element of it. While this can be seen as quite a difficult area to define, from our point of view, the work has been done on it now and there is a very workable definition that we think is very implementable. The most important thing is that it is workable from the complainant's point of view. We think people will be able to identify with it. It is also important that from the point of view of the WRC it is enforceable.