07/21/2009
Equality Bill
The Equality Network supports the new Equality Bill currently being considered by the Westminster Parliament. The bill would to a large extent level up the protection the law gives from discrimination, to give LGBT people the same level of protection currently given on grounds of race, gender and disability. However, we think that the bill is not perfect, and could be improved.
Latest news
On July 7th, the House of Commons finished the Committee stage for the Equality Bill, which involved 10 days of detailed debate. The missing protections outlined below were debated, but the UK Government opposed any changes to these, and no changes were made. You can read the debates via links from the Equality Bill Committee page.
The final stages in the Commons are the Report and 3rd Reading stages, which will probably be in late November. The bill will then go to the House of Lords for further detailed consideration and amendment. We hope that the bill will be passed in March 2010, just before Parliament closes for the general election.
The key issues
The Equality Bill was introduced in the House of Commons on 24th April 2009. It makes significant improvements to equality law for LGBT people, including:
- Extending the duty on the public sector to promote equality, to fully include sexual orientation and gender reassignment equality.
- Widening the definition of gender reassignment so that the anti-discrimination law protects people who transition or intend to transition gender without any medical supervision.
- Extending the protection against gender reassignment discrimination so that it covers people who are discriminated against because of their association with a transsexual person (eg a family member or friend), or because they are wrongly thought to be transsexual - the UK Government says this last point means that many non-transsexual transgender people will also be protected against discrimination.
- Adding protection from indirect discrimination on grounds of gender reassignment. Indirect discrimination is where everyone is treated the same, but the treatment has a particularly bad effect on a particular group of people. An example for gender reassignment would be where a service provider requires all service users to tell them any previous names they have used.
- Extending the protection against gender reassignment discrimination to cover discrimination by schools against pupils.
However, the bill is not perfect. In particular, it is missing the following protections:
- clear protection from sexual orientation harassment by providers of goods and services
- clear protection from gender reassignment harassment by schools
- a definition of gender identity discrimination and harassment that clearly covers all transgender people, wider than the proposed gender reassignment definition, which directly covers only transssexual people
- and there are problems with some of the exceptions that allow discrimination against transgender people in some circumstances.
The Equality Network is working for the Equality Bill to include these missing protections.
Our submission to the Commons Public Bill Committee that considered the Equality Bill, sets out our position on the bill in more detail. As part of our work on the first missing protection above, we also produced a survey report that considers the prevalence of sexual orientation harassment by providers of goods and services.
Background
The Westminster anti-discrimination laws ban discrimination in employment, and in the provision of goods and services, on grounds of disability, gender, gender reassignment, race, religion and belief, and sexual orientation. See our page on anti-discrimination law for more details. Discrimination on grounds of age is currently banned in employment only.
The law also requires all public bodies (for example, local councils, the NHS, the police, schools and colleges, etc) to positively promote disability, gender and race equality. However, this does not apply to sexual orientation equality, and only partially applies to gender reassignment equality.
In the summer of 2007, the UK Government consulted on possible changes to anti-discrimination law, as part of a wide-ranging discrimination law review. The Equality Network submitted a consultation response, calling for the levelling up of protection to the same standard for all equality 'strands' including sexual orientation and gender identity, and for the protection for gender identity to be extended. The law currently only protects transsexual people from discrimination on grounds of gender reassignment - we are calling for it to protect all transgender people from discrimination on grounds of gender identity or expression.
In June 2008, the UK Government published its proposals for the Equality Bill. In July 2008, the Government published more details of the proposed bill. The bill itself was introduced in the House of Commons in April 2009 (see above).
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