IEA Report Urges Changes to the UK’s Failing, ‘Two-tier’ Equality Act

A new discussion paper by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) argues that current UK equality legislation has created a two-tier society. The legislation has evolved beyond preventing direct discrimination to actively promoting differing treatment based on group identities. The IEA report argues that the Equality Act is failing to help the genuinely disadvantaged and needs to be stripped back.

A newly published IEA discussion paper suggests the United Kingdom’s approach to tackling discrimination needs fundamental reform.

The report, ‘Liberalising Discrimination Law,’ authored by Alex Morton (Director of Strategy at the Centre for Policy Studies) and Daniel Freeman (Managing Editor at the Institute of Economic Affairs), argues that the United Kingdom’s approach to tackling discrimination should be restricted to addressing direct discrimination rather than trying to equalise outcomes between differing group types.

The Liberalising Discrimination Law report suggests:

• Abolish the concept of indirect discrimination in UK law. Stop allowing the use of ‘positive action’ in employment and promotion decisions.
• Stop outlawing different pay for different work deemed as ‘equal value’ by the courts.
• Repeal the Public Sector Equality Duty. The Act states that public sector bodies must have ‘due regard to the need to… advance equality of opportunity between persons who share relevant protected characteristic and persons who do not’. It also requires a corporate body to encourage participation in public life by a person from a minority in which participation is low.

Morton and Freeman argue that by stripping back these features, the state would treat people as individuals, not, in the first instance, as members of a specific group. The paper’s authors also argue that the current approach in the United Kingdom is failing to support the genuinely disadvantaged and creating a two-tier society.

The paper traces how Britain’s approach to tackling discrimination has evolved through four stages during the past seven decades:

• Non-intervention
• to Laws targeting direct discrimination
• to Measures addressing ‘indirect discrimination and systemic inequalities
• to policies created to achieve equal outcomes between groups

The 2010 Equality Act consolidated previous legislation into a comprehensive framework addressing direct and indirect discrimination and focusing on group outcomes.

Sections of the Equality Act that go beyond banning direct discrimination by allowing claims of indirect discrimination and promoting positive action, which encourages organisations to favour specific groups in hiring and promotion, should be repealed. These measures focus on engineering group outcomes rather than ensuring fairness for individuals.

This approach has had unintended consequences. It shifts society away from focusing on individuals and toward group identities, often creating a two-tier relationship where people are treated differently because of their identity. The report argues that we should treat people as equal citizens, not differently, based on their sex, race, or ethnicity.

Efforts to equalise outcomes at a group level often overlook individuals facing genuine disadvantages, such as low-income backgrounds. It is deeply unfair to promote people who may be well off because they are from a particular group.

Freeman and Morton call for the Equality Act to be stripped back to focus solely on preventing direct discrimination against individuals, removing indirect discrimination and positive action provisions. This would create a framework that protects individual rights and people from discrimination rather than focusing on group outcomes, an illiberal approach that damages us all.

The paper, LIBERALISING DISCRIMINATION LAW, Why the Equality Act is unfit for purpose can be read here.