Government policy on legislation to tackle race and sex discrimination was developed over 25 years ago. The prevailing framework of legislation deals with discrimination based on grounds of sex, race and disability under the Sex Discrimination Act 1975, the Race Relations Act 1976 and the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 respectively and in Northern Ireland, religious belief and political opinion under the Fair Employment and Treatment (Northern Ireland) Order 1998. In relation to race, new positive duties for specified public bodies to have regard, in carrying out their functions, to the need to eliminate discrimination and promote equality of opportunity and good relations between different racial groups have been introduced under the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000. The Government has indicated an intention to extend these new positive duties to both sex and disability when parliamentary time allows.
With the benefit of 25 years of experience, the time is clearly over-ripe for the comprehensive reform of our body of anti-discrimination legislation. The approach of successive governments to the increasingly complex, opaque and anomalous state of British anti-discrimination law has been piecemeal and minimalist. It has involved the addition of new legislation in bits and pieces without implementing any absolute standard.
The complexity of the existing legislation is unnecessarily difficult for employers, in particular small businesses, to comply with their legal obligations. It hinders victims in their access to justice. Compliance is too dependent on the willingness of individuals to take a case to a court or tribunal with the result that entrenched patterns of systemic discrimination remain. Eliminating institutional barriers requires greater emphasis on changing organisational cultures from within. Too much emphasis is currently placed on state regulation and too little on the responsibility of individuals and organisations to generate change. What is needed is a coherent, user-friendly framework that covers all the main grounds of unfair discrimination. Concepts need to be rationally and consistently applied. There needs to be equal protection against each type of discrimination and equal access to speedy and inexpensive remedies, with assistance from an equality commission that has the necessary powers and resources to oversee the implementation of the legislation effectively and equitably.
There are currently three separate Commissions to oversee the legislation as it applies in relation to each ground: the Equal Opportunities Commission; the Commission for Racial Equality and the Disability Rights Commission. The existing equality agencies agree that there is little advantage to be gained from creating more equality agencies to tackle the different types of discrimination that are made unlawful by successive parliaments. The Northern Ireland model of a unified Equality Commission, working alongside a Human Rights Commission is working well in practice. The integration of the four existing equality agencies in Northern Ireland into a single Equality Commission does not appear to have resulted in the creation of a hierarchy of rights, by which some protected groups are given a higher priority than others, as some commentators had feared.
The Treaty of Amsterdam 1997 inserted a new Article 13 into the Treaty Establishing the European Community. This allows the Council of the European Union to "take appropriate action to combat discrimination based on sex, racial or ethnic origin, religion or belief, disability, age or sexual orientation". Two Directives (2000/43/EC and 2000/78/EC) were made in reliance on this provision in 2000. These require measures to be enacted prohibiting discrimination not only on grounds of sex, race and disability but also on grounds of sexual orientation, age and religion and belief in employment and training. Legislation must be enacted in relation to sexual orientation and religion by 2003 and age by 2006.
The Government has taken a narrow, restrictive approach both to the implementation of these directives and of the proposals made by the equality agencies. It intends to introduce subordinate legislation tackling the new grounds of unlawful discrimination only in the employment field, excluding discrimination in access to goods and services, including education and transport services.
In July 2000, the Centre for Public Law and Judge Institute of Management Studies in the University of Cambridge published a Report, Equality: a New Framework. Report of the Independent Review of the Enforcement of UK Anti-Discrimination Legislation. The report presents the findings of a project set up to review and evaluate proposals for the reform of UK anti-discrimination legislation, based on an assessment of the experience of those affected by the legislation. The draft Bill has been drawn up on the basis of the findings in this Report. It is intended both to implement the two European Directives and to co-ordinate, modernise and extend the arrangements for tackling discrimination which are currently established under a number of different enactments, including the Equal Pay Act 1970; the Sex Discrimination Act 1975; the Race Relations Act 1976; the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 and the Disability Rights Commission Act 1999. It applies to Great Britain. It provides a single framework for eliminating discrimination and promoting equality between different people, regardless of their racial or ethnic origin, religion or belief, sex, marital or family status, sexual orientation, gender reassignment, age or disability. The Bill abolishes the existing equality agencies and establishes the Equality Commission for Great Britain with a range of statutory powers to encourage and enforce observation of the Bill's requirements.
The Bill goes beyond the minimum provisions required by the Framework Directive (applying only in the employment field) to produce a single coherent regime for combating discrimination in relation to all the prohibited grounds equally. It provides a more advanced model for other EU member states and candidate members by placing the emphasis on positive duties to promote equality, which do not depend upon the proof of fault by an individual complainant. Basing itself on British and international experience over the past four decades, it seeks to encourage an inclusive, pro-active, non-adversarial approach to fair participation and fair access. We believe that is in full accord with the UK's obligations under EC law, international law and European human rights law.
Last updated November 2006