International Research into International Equality Legislation

Descriptions

The Scottish Government (SG), on behalf of the Scottish Ministers wishes to commission a review of international equality duties and how these compare to The Equality Act 2010 (Specific Duties) (Scotland) Regulations 2012. The review aims to explicitly outline how international equality duties impact the public sector, and those carrying out public functions (such as health care, education and transportation) to advance and mainstream equality. The Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED) is a duty on public bodies, and those carrying out public functions, which was created by Section 149 of the Equality Act 2010. It was developed in order to consolidate specific duties in respect of race, gender and disability that were all previously contained in separate Acts and extended it to other relevant protected characteristics. The SSDs are intended to provide a supporting framework to enable certain public authorities to better perform their PSED, through enhanced data collection and evaluation, and greater transparency and accountability. In this way, the specific duties help authorities to better perform their duty to have ‘due regard’ to the 3 needs of the PSED, and to mainstream equality in their everyday work. The Scottish Government recognise that for regulations to work well and to deliver tangible benefits we need to fully understand how they are working in practice and how they can be strengthened in order to deliver positive change. The aim of this research is to provide the Scottish Government with timely, robust information on International Equality Duties and Legislation to enable a strong evidence base to help inform, futureproof and ensure robust revised regulations as we review the Public Sector Equality Duty in Scotland. This research aims to inform policy decisions on the review of the Public Sector Equality Duty in Scotland by researching international duties and how these compare to proposed and current duties in Scotland. Specifically, the research specified has the following objectives: To identify countries which have similar equality legislation to the current duties outlined in The Equality Act 2010 (Specific Duties) (Scotland) Regulations 2012. The criteria for similar legislation would be based on the outputs from the Scotland Specific Duties such as reporting on progress to mainstream equality, gather employee information, publish gender pay gap information and duty to publish in a manner that is accessible. To examine the key similarities and differences of international public equality duties comparative to the current Scottish Regulations; To outline where the Scottish Government’s current consultation proposals are in line with or differ from equality legislation implemented in other countries; To research international evidence into the effectiveness of these similar duties; Highlight any equality legislation implemented in other countries which are deemed effective which differ from the Scottish Regulations, and explore reasons for the effectiveness of these; and To suggest how learning from this review might be applied to improve the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED) in Scotland and feed into the Scottish Government’s wider review of the Duty taking place It is expected that the vast majority of the research will be a desk based evidence review using published academic, grey and digital literature. However, there may be a need to supplement this desk-based work with some interviews where the detail is not available through literature.