Overview

The Equality Act 2010, which has arisen out numerous reviews starting in 2005, finally received Royal Assent on 8 April 2010 and the majority of its provisions will come into force in October 2010. The Act seeks to consolidate existing discrimination legislation in non-technical “plain English” to make it more accessible and easier to understand. As well as harmonising existing legislation into a single Act it introduces several new rights and remedies. All earlier pieces of legislation will be repealed.

In addition, the Equality and Human Rights Commission has published three draft statutory codes of practice which will replace the existing codes of practice and which are also expected to come into force at the same time as the Act.

This briefing highlights the key points of the Act, including its purpose of harmonising the definitions of discrimination and harassment previously found across the various strands. It sets out the “protected characteristics” which are age, disability, gender re-assignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex and sexual orientation. There are no new categories although the power to amend the definition of “race” to include “caste” in the future has been included should it be deemed necessary. The familiar key concepts of current discrimination legislation are retained and the definitions unified across all the strands i.e. direct discrimination, indirect discrimination, harassment and victimisation. This means, for example, that there is now provision for indirect disability discrimination.

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