By Sara Meyer & Hilary Larter
|Published 05 November 2026
On 29 October 2026, the government published its response to the Equality Law Call for Evidence, which ran from April to June 2025. The response document offers a brief summary of the government's intended approach to the reform of various areas of equality law, as outlined below.
The response document refers to the government's consultation on equal pay and pay discrimination, which ran from 14 July to 27 October 2026. As we reported here, that consultation set out proposals to amend the law in two phases. The first, entitled "Fixing the System", would introduce greater pay transparency and stronger enforcement of existing equal pay law, while the second, entitled "Making the right to equal pay effective for all" would bring the protections available for sex, race, and disability pay discrimination closer together.
The response document confirms that the government will set out next steps in this area once it has considered the consultation responses.
As of 30 October 2026, under changes introduced by the Employment Rights Act 2025 (ERA 2025), the duty on employers to prevent sexual harassment (the "preventative duty") has been strengthened to a duty to take all reasonable steps, and employers are required to prevent harassment of their employees by third parties. They will only have a defence to claims of third party harassment if they have taken all reasonable steps to prevent it.
The ERA 2025 also grants the government power to make regulations specifying steps that will be considered reasonable for the purposes of the preventative duty. The government has indicated that it will take into account responses to the Equality Law Call for Evidence when considering whether to make such regulations. The government only intends to make regulations where they would be "effective and proportionate". The government also intends to develop guidance on protecting volunteers, interns, and freelancers from harassment.
The government intends to commence the Equality Act 2010 socio-economic duty in England, requiring specified public authorities to consider how their decisions might reduce socio-economic inequalities. It will also develop statutory guidance in this area.
The government considers that bringing into force section 14 of the Equality Act 2010 (which would prohibit discrimination on the basis of a combination of two protected characteristics) could create uncertainty without materially increasing protection. Instead, the government will issue guidance explaining existing protections against discrimination involving combinations of protected characteristics. (Alongside the response document, the government has published the research that informed its position on this issue.)
The response document states that the government is committed to ensuring compliance with the PSED by all bodies exercising public functions, and notes that the Office for Equality and Opportunity has published guidance to assist with this.
The response document provides very little in the way of substantive details. On equal pay reform, this is unsurprising, as the government will not yet have had time to consider the responses to that consultation. Employers are advised to keep abreast of any announcements, and may wish to consider assessing their current pay structures to identify any underlying equal pay or discrimination risks if they do not already do so.
The extension of the preventative duty to require "all reasonable steps" dramatically increases the difficulty for employers in complying with the duty. Regulations setting out examples of reasonable steps would therefore be welcome, but the response document does not give any indication as to the likely timing of these. In the meantime, therefore, employers should ensure that they have revisited and updated their harassment risk assessments to put themselves in the best possible position to ensure compliance.
The government's decision not to bring section 14 of the Equality Act into force is likely to be welcomed by employers, as it avoids introducing further complexity to what is already a difficult area of the law.
Government Response to the Call for Evidence on Equality Law
