Who is protected by the Equality Act?
Everyone in Britain is protected. This is because the Equality Act protects people against discrimination because of the protected characteristics that we all have. Under the Equality Act, there are nine protected characteristics:
- age
- disability
- gender reassignment
- marriage and civil partnership
- pregnancy and maternity
- race
- religion or belief
- sex
- sexual orientation
Situations in which you are protected from discrimination
Under the Equality Act you are protected from discrimination:
- when you are in the workplace
- when you use public services like healthcare (for example, visiting your doctor or local hospital) or education (for example, at your school or college)
- when you use businesses and other organisations that provide services and goods (like shops, restaurants, and cinemas)
- when you use transport
- when you join a club or association (for example, your local tennis club)
- when you have contact with public bodies like your local council or government departments
How can you be discriminated against?
There are four main types of discrimination.
Direct discrimination
This means treating one person worse than another person because of a protected characteristic. For example, a promotion comes up at work. The employer believes that people’s memories get worse as they get older so doesn’t tell one of his older employees about it, because he thinks the employee wouldn’t be able to do the job.
Indirect discrimination
This can happen when an organisation puts a rule or a policy or a way of doing things in place which has a worse impact on someone with a protected characteristic than someone without one. For example a local authority is planning to redevelop some of its housing. It decides to hold consultation events in the evening. Many of the female residents complain that they cannot attend these meetings because of childcare responsibilities.
Harassment
This means people cannot treat you in a way that violates your dignity, or creates a hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment. For example a man with Down’s syndrome is visiting a pub with friends. The bar staff make derogatory and offensive comments about him, which upset and offend him.
Victimisation
This means people cannot treat you unfairly if you are taking action under the Equality Act (like making a complaint of discrimination), or if you are supporting someone else who is doing so. For example, an employee makes a complaint of sexual harassment at work and is dismissed as a consequence.
What else does the Equality Act do?
Public Sector Equality Duty
The Equality Act also requires public bodies (like local councils, hospitals, and publicly-funded service providers) to consider how their decisions and policies affect people with different protected characteristics. The public body also should have evidence to show how it has done this.
For example, a local authority wants to improve its local bus service. It carries out a survey of people who use public transport and finds that very few women use buses at night because they are worried about sexual harassment. The local authority decides to work with the police and the transport provider, as well as local residents, to find ways to address this problem and make the bus service more inclusive.
The real impact of the equality act
In practice the equality act does nothing at all for autistic people (the people writing this) but your mileage may vary. In particular UK councils seem to use the equality act like a handbook for confounding communications and deliberately torturing us.
What does the Care Act do?
The Act sets out when the local authority has a responsibility to meet someone’s care and support needs. It also sets out how it can do so even if it does not have to. The Act also says what must happen next to help the person make decisions about how their needs should be met.
The Act gives local authorities a new legal responsibility to provide a care and support plan (or a support plan in the case of a carer).
For the first time, the Act provides people with a legal entitlement to a personal budget, which is an important part of the care and support plan, or support plan. The personal budget must be included in every plan, unless the person is only receiving intermediate care or reablement support to meet their identified needs.
This adds to a person’s right to ask for a direct payment to meet some or all of their needs. Provided that the direct payment is used to meet the needs identified in the plan, the person should have freedom over how the money is spent.
Even when an assessment says that someone does not have needs that the local authority should meet, the local authority must advise people about what needs they do have, and how to meet them or prevent further needs from developing.
The person concerned must be involved in developing their plan. The local authority will have to do everything it reasonably can to agree the plan with them.
It must also provide an independent advocate to help the person take part in the planning and review process, if that person would otherwise have substantial difficulty in doing so.
Completing the planning process and putting in place care and support arrangements does not mean the end of the local authority’s responsibilities. The local authority has a legal responsibility to review the plan to make sure that the adult’s needs and outcomes continue to be met over time. If anything has changed, the authority must carry out a new assessment. The person themselves also has the right to request a review of their care and support plan, if they wish.