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Government publishes Equality Strategy

2 December 2010

The Government has today published its equality strategy, which can be downloaded here. The strategy states five principles: 

  • creating equal opportunities for all
  • devolving power to people
  • transparency
  • supporting social action
  • embedding equality

There are implications for employers in both the public and private sectors, with commitments in the following areas:

  1. To implement the public sector Equality Duty, with specific duties focused on transparency and devolved accountability;
  2. To work to develop a voluntary scheme for gender pay reporting in the private sector, particularly for businesses with 150 or more employees – mandatory reporting under section 78 of the Equality Act will be postponed until the success of the voluntary approach has been assessed (this might be regarded as another Liberal Democrat climb down given their specific manifesto committments);
  3. To permit employers, from April 2011, to apply positive action in recruitment and promotion processes;
  4. To work with business to develop measures to promote more women onto the boards of public companies, and continue to work to improve the representation of women on public boards but falling short of commiting to a quota at this stage;
  5. To extend the right to request flexible working to all employees;
  6. To consult on a new system of shared flexible parental leave;
  7. To phase out the Default Retirement Age, with a response to the recent consultation by the end of 2010;
  8. To reform Access to Work so that disabled people can apply for jobs with funding already secured;
  9. To review the regime for the management and disclosure of criminal records, and to scale back the vetting and barring scheme.

This strategy claims to put equality at the heart of government, ensuring that departments take responsibility for and ownership of progressing equality commitments – the Government Equalities Office will be brought into the Home Office and cease to be a separate department (probably from April 2011) and a new Inter-Ministerial Group on Equalities has been established.

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