Employer information: The report acknowledges that there has been huge progress towards equality over the last 60 years but that entrenched inequalities in employment, education and quality of life remain. In the employment field, three groups below retirement age stand out as facing particularly large difficulties, these are:

• disabled people

• Pakistani and Bangladeshi women

• mothers with young children

The report makes a broad range of social and political recommendations, three of which are of interest from an employment law perspective:

• a simpler legal framework
• wider provision for positive action
• a more sophisticated enforcement regime

Legal framework: the recommendation for a starting point for improving the law is for a Single Equality Act with a simpler, more coherent framework than the current mass of legislation. However, the report recommends that, within that framework, changes are required:

• the law must allow action to help groups as well as individuals
• the existing single-issue public sector duties to promote equality based on sex, race and disability should be combined into a single integrated public sector duty covering all equality groups
• the law should encourage organisations to shift their focus away from bureaucratic processes to outcomes
• The report does not propose allowing positive discrimination, research demonstrated that there is no public call for this at present.  However, the report does say that greater use should be made of the freedom permitted under EU law to take positive action.
• The report recommends that the Commission for Equality and Human Rights needs to play a "more dynamic" role in enforcement, although this would be mainly overseeing enforcement by other agencies, rather than enforcing itself.  The recommendations for this include:
  • introducing a duty of transparency for public bodies and encouraging private organisations to do the same
  • empowering communities and company shareholders to "call for action" through petitions or similar means
  • adding equality to the enforcement duties of existing public sector inspectors
  • a "less legalistic and more flexible sanction" than a full-scale Commission for Equality and Human Rights investigation, and for organisations that are persistently in breach of the law to be placed on a blacklist
• Further information, and a full version of the Equalities Review can be accessed via  www.theequalitiesreview.org.uk