If nine become one

As the government tries to bring anti-discrimination law under the one umbrella of the single equality bill, Ian Macrae finds differing degrees of support

It would be easy to imagine that the divergence of views on the rightness or otherwise of the government’s goal of bringing nine pieces of anti-discrimination legislation together via a single equality bill would split according to whether the views were held by disabled or non-disabled people.

This turns out not to be the case.

The single equality approach finds support across the divide, with highly-placed and influential disabled people including Baroness Campbell of Surbiton and Lord Low of Dalston both in the “content” lobby, siding with such government figures as women and equality minister Harriet Harman and her junior minister Barbara Follett.

Ms Follett told Disability Now that the government wants to simplify and tidy up existing legislation.

“Our main aim is to declutter the current legislation: nine acts, numerous small bills and two-and-a-half-thousand pages of guidance. We want to make it easier for people to know what their rights are.”

In terms of the benefits Ms Follett sees a single equality act bringing, she says: “We’re going to try to make it more straightforward to show that you’re disabled. Under the DDA, you have to prove your disability and the single equality bill intends to repeal that.”

There are disabled people who view the new approach with suspicion, even trepidation, however, and at least one of them is a big hitter.

Sir Bert Massie is the former chair of the Disability Rights Commission, one of the regulatory bodies replaced by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) last year. Now a member of the EHRC’s disability committee, he accepts that the proposed new act is now necessary, but criticises the way it came about. In short, he thinks that things were done in the wrong order.

“By setting up the EHRC first, [the government] put the cart before the horse. And now the cart and the horse are on totally separate roads.”

He feels there should have been a thorough­going review to assess and establish the precise needs of disabled people in terms of the equality agenda. That review would have then informed the way any new bill was framed.

In response to disabled people’s concerns that we continue to lag behind in the equality stakes and therefore require discrete rights legislation and protection, Barbara Follett tries to be reassuring.

“We’ll try to strengthen rather than weaken the situation for disabled people. We’ll just make sure that what you’ve got you keep.”

Whether such assurances will allay the concerns of activists like Sir Bert remains to be seen. He at least continues to worry that the responsibility for framing the future of disability equality rests with people who may not know just what we need.