The public sector equality duty: twenty years of friction, one Conservative pitch to dismantle it

At a campaign event in Brixton on 9 June 2026, Kemi Badenoch, leader of the UK Conservative Party, argued that a core plank of British equalities law — the public sector equality duty created by the Equality Act 2010 — should be replaced with what she called "common sense." The duty, in force for more than fifteen years, requires public bodies in England, Scotland and Wales to consider how their decisions affect people with protected characteristics such as race, sex, disability, age, sexual orientation and religion. Badenoch's case, as reported in The Guardian on 9 June 2026, is that the obligation has hardened into box-ticking and encouraged division rather than inclusion. Legal specialists, the paper noted, warn that removing it would expose disabled people, ethnic minorities and other groups to a higher risk of discrimination in everything from local planning to NHS commissioning decisions.

The argument is older than the present leader. It has surfaced in various forms since the duty's predecessor — the race, disability and gender equality duties introduced in the 2000s under Tony Blair's government — was first drafted. What is new is that a mainstream UK party leader is now treating its abolition as live policy.

What the duty actually requires

The duty is procedural rather than substantive. It does not tell a council what to do about a school closure, a hospital reconfiguration or a procurement decision. It tells officials that, before deciding, they must have "due regard" to the need to eliminate discrimination, advance equality of opportunity and foster good relations between protected groups. Compliance is enforced by the courts, not by a regulator with a budget. A claimant who believes a public body has failed to discharge the duty can bring a judicial-review claim; if the court agrees, the decision can be quashed and the body sent back to do the analysis properly.

That structure is precisely what the duty's defenders say is being misread by its critics. To characterise the duty as a "box-ticking" burden, in this reading, is to mistake evidence of rigour — the published impact assessment, the consultation log — for theatre. To call it divisive is to mistake the explicit naming of group harms for the invention of those harms. Disabled people, the legal specialists quoted by The Guardian point out, did not need the duty to be invented upon; the duty merely obliges public bodies to record what they have always affected.

The case for abolition, in its strongest form

Badenoch's framing has a more sophisticated version than the press lines suggest. The duty, on this account, sits inside a wider equality-and-rights architecture — the Equality Act 2010 itself, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, the proliferation of equality impact assessments in Whitehall — that, taken together, has shifted the default of public life. A library closure no longer needs to consider the impact on elderly or disabled users; it must do so, on the record, and the courts can intervene if it has not. The cumulative effect, the argument goes, is to insert the language of protected characteristics into decisions that ought to be made on technical or fiscal grounds, and to make every public body the site of a running argument about group rights.

It is not a frivolous reading. Several common-law jurisdictions — including parts of Canada and Australia, though not the United States — have moved away from positive equality duties toward a more purely anti-discrimination model in which the state enforces a floor but does not oblige itself to actively advance equality. The Conservative critique is, in effect, that the UK adopted the more ambitious model in 2010 without ever holding a serious public argument about whether it was the right one.

The structural pattern

The friction is not really about one clause in one statute. It is about how a modern, demographically diverse state justifies the unequal distribution of public goods. A duty that requires the state to name who loses when a service is cut, and to record the answer, sits uneasily with a politics that prefers to discuss services in the aggregate. When austerity arrived in the 2010s, the duty became one of the few procedural tools that forced councils to quantify, on the page, who would be hurt by which cut. It is no accident that the loudest objections to the duty have come forward in periods of fiscal pressure on local government.

A second, more durable pattern is visible in the way the duty has been litigated. Most successful claims have not come from the groups the duty's critics claim it favours. They have come from disabled people challenging inaccessible housing allocations, from women challenging NHS commissioning decisions, and from age-discrimination claims in employment transitions. The case law, in other words, is overwhelmingly about the duty functioning as a backstop for service users against administrative convenience — the opposite of the cultural-politics caricature the duty is now most often met with in the press.

Stakes, contested ground, and what the sources do not say

If the duty were repealed, the practical effect would not be the end of equalities law. Direct discrimination, indirect discrimination, harassment and victimisation under the Equality Act 2010 would remain actionable, and public bodies would still owe duties under the Human Rights Act 1998. What would change is the asymmetry of evidence. Today, if a council closes a day centre for elderly residents, it must produce, on request, the analysis it carried out. After repeal, the council would still be liable for discriminatory impact, but the procedural moment of forcing that analysis to exist on paper — the document a court reads when reviewing the decision — would be gone. Campaigners for disabled rights, including organisations quoted in The Guardian's reporting, argue that this is precisely the procedural protection their clients most depend on.

The counter-position, again, is that the duty has been captured by a small professional class of consultants and that its removal would, in the long run, force public bodies to defend decisions on their actual merits rather than on the merits of the equality assessment attached to them. There is a respectable version of this argument. The Guardian's reporting does not settle which side of that argument the British public now sits on, and the polling is not in the source material. What is settled is that a party leader has, in 2026, put the duty's abolition into a live political offer, and that the legal community has responded in unusually unified terms. The next test is whether the offer travels outside the Conservative membership and into the broader electorate at a moment when the Equalities Act itself, fifteen years on, is also being asked to justify its existence.

Desk note: this piece reports The Guardian's 9 June 2026 framing of Badenoch's Brixton remarks and the legal-specialist rebuttal that ran alongside them. The structural argument about austerity-era enforcement and procedural backstops is editorial, drawn from the same source item; the cross-jurisdictional comparison to Canada and Australia is contextual and not in the Guardian's reporting. Monexus will revisit this story if polling on the duty itself becomes available.