The answer is easy

The government’s single equality bill is an important step forward, says Andy Rickell, but it is lacking in ambition

I felt privileged five years ago, while chief executive of what is now the UK Disabled People’s Council, to represent non-governmental disability organisations on the government taskforce that helped set up the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

I am pleased that the government has picked up a unanimous recommendation of that taskforce, that with a single equality commission, it makes sense to have a single piece of equalities legislation.

The big question is, can this consolidation help overcome the weaknesses in the Disability Discrimination Acts (DDA), and create a coherence and effectiveness in equality legislation which clearly does not exist – witness persistent inequalities for women and black and minority ethnic communities in particular. Or will it be a hotchpotch of limited measures that reflect political priorities?

Let’s be honest. The DDA is fundamentally flawed. Its worst flaw is that the definition of disability is such a mealy-mouthed impairment-based set of words as to fail to protect hundreds of thousands of people who experience really negative discrimination. Instead, all the new legislation needs to say is that it covers people who experience discrimination because of actual or perceived impairment. The law should not be about proving you are impaired, but that you suffer unfair discrimination.

All the new legislation needs to say is that it protects anybody who experiences unfair discrimination or treatment. It does not need to specify particular grounds like race or gender or religion, so it can cover everybody equally, and would therefore include well-known areas of discrimination like “class”.

Note that I said “unfair” discrimination. Discrimination happens all the time. When we genuinely choose the best person for the job, that is discrimination, and it’s fair. Or when we genuinely choose the best person to undergo rationed medical treatment on the basis of clinical need or quality of life, that is fair discrimination, too. The difficulty is that we all bring a whole range of pre-conceptions about whether certain people are “better” candidates than others, and individuals have a right to be protected by law when our pre-conceptions muddy our behaviour and they suffer unfairly.

People may say this approach is ridiculous, as claims of inequality will be made on spurious grounds. Not so. You would have to prove that you were unfairly disadvantaged in comparison to other people. In my experience, people only want to go to court over discrimination which is major or blatant. Timewasters could be sifted out.

Which brings me to the other fundamental weakness of the DDA: the inability to enforce our rights. Employment tribunals seem to work relatively well. But educational tribunals are heavily weighted against the disabled child and their parents, and the county court system is too onerous for individual disabled people to take discrimination cases on goods or services. Having a clearly designated equality tribunal, modelled on employment tribunals, with limited costs for the genuine claimant, would offer real social justice to those who most need it.

The existence of the bill is important. But the current draft needs to be more ambitious, if equality is really the government’s intention.

• Andy Rickell is an executive director at Scope