The move to establish a Single Equality Act was overwhelmingly supported by all sections of the Labour party at the recent National Policy Forum. The initially reluctant government agreed to compromise wording for the forthcoming manifesto. So a re-elected Labour government is now committed to introducing a Single Equality Act.
A Single Equality Commission is to be created to consider the need for consolidation and simplification of the existing flawed primary legislation.
The single commission is unlikely to exist before 2008 at the earliest. As a consequence, this popular and vital reform risks languishing at the back of a crowded legislative priority list. This would be a huge missed opportunity for Labour and a real setback to the prospects of making effective freedom from discrimination a reality in the UK.
The government should be embracing this agenda and putting it at the centre of the manifesto for a third term. For individuals it promises real opportunity to develop to their full potential. For employers or providers it promises simplification and a lower compliance burden.
The existing anti-discrimination laws in the UK are incoherent and ridiculously complex. Since the enactment of the first anti-discrimination legislation by Harold Wilson’s Labour government 28 years ago, our law in this area has developed in a piecemeal fashion. There are 30 Acts, 38 statutory instruments, eleven codes of practice and twelve EC directives. As a result we do not have a coherent and predictable standard to be applied in all cases of unjustifiable discrimination.
The current arrangements satisfy no one.
The increasing complexity of the law hinders victims of discrimination in their attempts to seek compliance or redress. They also make it much harder for employers, or those who provide goods and services to comply with their legal obligations, even if they wish to. This is especially true of small businesses who struggle in the mire of complex and inconsistent obligations. This makes it much easier for those bad providers or employers who wish to evade their responsibilities to do so with impunity.
The existing law excludes some from the protection they should be entitled to. Those who are discriminated against on the grounds of gender, race or disability are more widely protected than the newer categories for no logical reason. Lesbians and gay men, older people and people facing discrimination for their religious beliefs, only have limited protection in relation to employment. They can still be lawfully discriminated against in the provision of goods or services. So an individual can quite legally be refused access to a shop or denied the tenancy of a rented property because of their age, sexuality or religious belief. This is simply unjustifiable and should be dealt with early in the next parliament.
Existing anti-discrimination law does not promote equality of opportunity or strengthen prevention. The government did introduce a requirement in the Race Relations Amendment Act for public bodies to eliminate discrimination and to promote equality of opportunity. They plan to do the same for disability but a pledge to introduce such a power for gender appears to have been forgotten. There is clearly a need to extend this positive duty to other strands, too, and after simplification of all anti-discrimination law to apply it in the private sector as well. Prevention is clearly better than cure or redress after the event.
The duty to promote needs to be redesigned from the very process-based ‘tick box’ system that has come to characterise the Race Relations Amendment Act. This has made too little practical difference on the ground and has generated paperwork but no meaningful change.
A much more focused concentration on the outcome rather than the process needs to be at the centre of the desirable extension of this duty. Labour should seize this opportunity to re-engineer our equality framework into an understandable and usable tool for maximising the potential of all our citizens, whether employees, employers or providers.