Unfit for purpose

As the Government’s single equality bill continues its passage through Parliament, disability lawyer Caroline Gooding raises some concerns about what it’s going to do for our rights

The single equality bill was published on 27 April and aims to roll nine major pieces of legislation and some 100 statutory instruments into one single Act.

Among its measures, it will place a new equality duty on public bodies, replacing the three existing duties on gender, race and disability; require the use of public procurement to improve equality, protect carers from discrimination, ban discrimination in private clubs and strengthen protection from discrimination for disabled people.

These are worthy aims but I’m concerned with the way the bill is drafted. The bill could inadvertently
weaken disability rights by failing to indicate clearly how they differ from other equality provisions.

For example, the law should specify that positive discrimination in favour of disabled people goes further than it does with other equality strands. That’s not clear as the law is currently drafted.

Some employers advertise opportunities exclusively for disabled applicants. It’s legal for them to do so and it will still be legal after the bill is passed, but unless lawyers are absolutely clear about this, they may intervene wrongly to disallow it.

My second concern has to do with whether we’ll be able to prevent a weakening of disability equality.

The bill fails to require public authorities to treat disability distinctively. It states that compliance may involve treating people “more favourably” but fails to reflect that disabled people’s needs must be prioritised over other equality strands.

But my greatest concern is about the current consultation on the specific equality duties. At present authorities must produce equality schemes to show how they plan to promote disability alongside race and gender equality. The consultation proposes instead that authorities set equality objectives and draw up action plans for achieving these.

But how will an objective be defined? If there’s a requirement to set equality objectives but no stipulation on how many or how significant they must be, or that they should cover the whole range of the authorities’ functions, authorities may be able to get away with doing very little.

The consultation also proposes that there should be no requirement to publish separate information about equality objectives or annual progress, but that these could instead be included in business plans. But how on earth could someone be expected to find equality policies in the lengthy business plans that public bodies produce? It makes a mockery of the goal of greater transparency.

One improvement I think we can secure is a ban on all pre-employment questions about disability and health. This could really help stop employers discriminating in recruitment. The Government currently opposes this but a recent Work and Pensions Committee Report recommended it. Even the CBI supports it.

The equality bill isn’t fit for purpose in its current form. But there’s still time to change it and I’d urge disability groups to examine the proposals and send the Government their responses.

• Caroline Gooding is an honorary advisor to the charity RADAR