Equality Bill

The government has published further details on its Equality Bill that aims to simplify and strengthen the law on equality. This page outlines the key areas for employers and next steps.

The Government is now establishing a cross-government working group to develop the proposals, in preparation for introducing the Bill during the next parliamentary session (starting October 2008). This work will be supported by an expert reference group, involving a range of key stakeholders, and we will ensure that employers' issues and concerns are fed into the key groups.

Key areas

The Bill's key proposals are to:

• Introduce a new Equality Duty on the public sector - this places a new equality duty on public bodies, bringing together the three existing duties (race, disability and gender) and extending it to gender reassignment, age, sexual orientation and religion or belief. It will also cover the legal requirements on equal pay. Public bodies will need to tackle discrimination and promote equality on all the key diversity strands.
• End age discrimination - covering service delivery as well as employment. The Bill will outlaw unjustifiable age discrimination by organisations providing goods, facilities and services, and carrying out public services. The Government is making a separate statement about health and social care during the next parliamentary session, that sets out a defined programme of work to tackle age discrimination in these sectors and to help service providers prepare for legislation
• Ensure transparency - requiring public bodies to comply with the Equality Duty and report on areas such as gender pay, ethnic minority employment and disability employment. Public bodies will also need to promote equality through their purchasing function. Linked to this, the Bill aims to improve transparency in the private sector, in particular through the introduction of a new 'kite-mark' that recognises those employers who are transparent about reporting their progress on equality
• Extend the scope of positive action - to enable employers to take into account the under-representation of disadvantaged groups, when selecting between two equally qualified candidates eg. women and people from ethnic minority communities
• Strengthen enforcement - allowing tribunals to make wider recommendations in discrimination cases, going beyond the individual involved. The Government is also exploring how cases can be brought on combined multiple grounds eg. age and gender, as well as allowing representative actions eg. trade unions making cases on behalf of groups of people. The Government also wants to ensure support for trade union equality representatives

Next steps

Once the details have been finalised, the Government will consult on the Bill's final draft.

Background

The comprehensive paper on the Equality Bill also summarises the Government's response to its 2007 consultation on the Discrimination Law Review. It follows the publication of its earlier paper on the proposed Bill, Framework for a Fairer Future, in June.