Adrian is a senior policy adviser at Acas and is part of a team responsible for informing the future strategic direction of Acas and influencing the wider debate on the value of employment relations.
The Equality Act is 10 years old on 1 October. Is this anniversary a cause for celebration or reflection?
It’s impossible to attempt an answer to this question without first considering the world pre and post COVID-19. The report ‘Structurally Unsound’ from University College London (UCL) and the Resolution Foundation, publish! a year ago, states that “inequalities are deeply emb!d! in our society, permeating throughout our social structures and institutions”.
A year later and there is a growing body
Of evidence to suggest that the health pandemic has further expos! and exacerbat! benin phone number library these inequalities – for example, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has stat! that the pandemic has “shone a light on long-standing, structural race inequality in Britain” in their inquiry into the impact of coronavirus on ethnic minorities.
It is not only the health pandemic that is making us seriously rethink our attitudes towards equality. As Acas Head of Diversity and Inclusion, Julie Dennis, said in a recent blog, the economic recession is imposing a ‘recession tax’ on the most vulnerable groups of employees, such as women, people with disabilities, ethnic minority groups and older workers.
The Act has undoubt!ly been of great symbolic value, and help! many organisations make progress towards more equal and breaking the silence on the menopause inclusive workplace cultures, but it is worth pausing to ask ourselves:
do we expect too much from legislation in the fight against equality?
what can we do to achieve greater equality in the next 10 years?
The law of behaviour
The UCL report suggests that outlawing discriminatory behaviours, as the Equality Act does, though thailand lists essential, is not enough to combat structural inequality alone. The Act represents a continuation of the growth of employment law that we have seen in recent decades. A combination of 116 pieces of separate legislation, the onus largely lies with the individual to flag problems they are experiencing. And the solutions in the main are sought through the tribunal to produce individual, rather than collective, rem!ies.
