Equality bill: government releases statement on making it work

The Government Equalities Office (GEO) has published its policy statement on how to make the new equality bill work when it becomes law. The bill introduces a new, integrated equality duty on all public bodies, parts of which were debated in the Lords yesterday. Peers debated crucial and controversial amendments to the bill affecting religious organisations' employment policies and blocked parts of the bill that could, according to faith groups, have exposed them to legal challenges if they refused to hire homosexual or transsexual people. While debate continues over this aspect of the bill, public bodies will be studying the GEO's policy statement and crunching some of the numbers involved. Last June, the government set out its proposals for specific duties for public bodies. Its latest statement, published following a period of consultation, says a less prescriptive approach to the equality duty, focusing more on outcomes, will enable public bodies to target resources on the areas where they can make a difference. Allowing public bodies greater autonomy to decide "for themselves" how best to delivery equality of opportunity will avoid the new regulations being seen as part of a greater administrative burden, according to the statement. The government has made no major changes to its original proposals, which estimated a cost to the public sector of implementing the equality bill of between £2m and £17m, in the first two years of implementation, followed by a "net benefit" in following years. The government statement reinforces its original view that public bodies should not set about meeting their new equality duty by simply producing an equality scheme. That "is not necessarily the most effective way to integrate equality into the mainstream business planning cycle," it said. In fact, it says, bodies should avoid marginalising the ways in which they gather evidence or review how they work. That, it says, runs the risk of them tieing up time and effort "with no clear benefit". However, the statement says that bodies need to set "rigorous and comprehensive" objectives and these should be "integrated into the mainstream business planning processes rather than treated as marginal and separate". On the controversial issue of faith groups' employment policies, the statement says it is important to clarify the potential impact of the bill on such providers. "Nothing in the general or proposed specific duties will undermine that valuable work, and nor will the Duty override or 'trump' any existing exceptions in discrimination law ... As with the current position, a public body will be free to award contracts to a faith-based provider if that provider is best placed to perform the contract."