On Equality and Equal Pay: How expanding the Equality Act would increase discrimination and damage growth
Daniel Dieppe, March 2026
Should Britain’s equality laws be expanded? Under government proposals, mandatory pay gap reporting and equal value pay claims will be fully expanded to race and disability, where they are currently only available for gender.
Given the primary role that equal value pay claims have played in compromising major British businesses, the bankruptcy of Birmingham City Council, eroding public services and damaging local authority finances, the report argues for the removal of equal value pay claims altogether, rather than their expansion as is currently planned.
Furthermore, while the expansion of mandatory pay gap reporting to ethnicity and disability may have laudable aims and intentions, On Equality and Equal Pay argues it will inadvertently stimulate more discrimination. As Lord Sewell writes in the foreword, ‘it is a policy that is, in practice, unworkable.’ Instead, the report offers a pathway to better solutions for tackling discrimination by heading back to first principles. The conflation of disparity and discrimination, the report notes, distorts anti-discrimination efforts. The crux of the problem is that closing a non-discriminatory disparity – as the proposed expansion intends – is a necessarily discriminatory process.
On Equality and Equal Pay delves into the unintended consequences of equal value pay claims and their murky origins in a 1982 European Court of Justice ruling. In addition, the report finds dozens of local authorities have been stung by equal value pay claims totalling billions of pounds – and which the report argues are unworkable, costly and damaging.
“This important report by Civitas exposes a government overly influenced by trade unionists and activists who are determined to implement a policy that is, in practice, unworkable. Crucially, the authors are neither opposed to anti-discrimination principles nor to workers’ rights. On the contrary, they demonstrate that the proposed Equality Bill risks undermining fairness in the workplace, increasing social division, and damaging economic growth.”
Lord Sewell, chair of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities
Media Coverage:
Rod Liddle in The Sun: ‘UK is skint, NHS is crumbling & our Navy hasn’t got any workable ships, so what’s Keir doing? Blowing BILLIONS on wokery‘ (£)
Civitas on X: ‘What’s going wrong with the extension of equality laws?‘
About the Author
Daniel Dieppe is a researcher for Civitas and co-author of Renewing Classical Liberal Education. He has previously worked in Parliament for an MP and a Peer, and has also conducted research for the Family Hubs Network and the policy unit Tax and the Family.
About the foreword writer
Lord Dr Tony Sewell CBE is an educationalist, academic, author, and Conservative life peer. In 2020, he was appointed chair of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, which found that while there were racial disparities, there was no evidence of institutional racism in British society. Today, Lord Sewell chairs Generating Genius, a charity he founded that helps black and disadvantaged students into STEM careers.
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