The New Equality Bill

The much anticipated Equality Bill was published yesterday.  The Bill is intended to combine all of the existing legislation on discrimination into one single statute and creates a single public sector equality duty, which is extended to age, religion or belief and sexual orientation, as well as pregnancy and maternity and gender reassignment. The obligation to have “due regard to” eliminating discrimination and advancing equality of opportunity has been retained.

The Bill includes new definitions of indirect discrimination and disability discrimination and outlaws associative discrimination.  It allows positive discrimination during recruitment in favour of disadvantaged groups when faced with candidates who are otherwise equally qualified, and introduces a new duty for some key public bodies to pay due regard to socio-economic disadvantage in making strategic decisions, and extends public sector duties to ensure equality to age discrimination.

The Bill bans pay secrecy clauses in employment contracts and contains a clause allowing the Secretary of State to order employers with more than 250 employees to publish information about disparities in pay between male and female employees - although apparently the government has announced that this power will not be exercised in the next four years.

Aspects of the Bill may change as it progresses through Parliament and it is expected to come into force in 2011.