Wording to challenge Council Equalities pledge

[RockaLock]

So my local council have just published their new Equalities Pledge.

The blurb in the announcement says that "The Equalities Pledge covers all protected characteristics...."

But, as you can probably guess, the wording of the pledge is:

"To Positively promote the equality of opportunity for individuals of all characteristics namely: disability, gender, race, age, sexual orientation, religion and belief, marriage and civil partnership and gender identity by recognising significant celebrations and awareness days and ensuring that work place practices do not discriminate against any groups"

Yep, gender and gender identity make the list; sex and gender reassignment do not.

Can someone point me in the direction of wording so that I can point out to the council that their wording is a load of bollocks and not in line with the EHRC list etc? I know there are some good links/examples out there.

www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/contents

The protected characteristics
The following characteristics are protected characteristics—
age;
disability;
gender reassignment;
marriage and civil partnership;
pregnancy and maternity;
race;
religion or belief;
sex;
sexual orientation.

I wrote to my council saying that they had omitted protected characteristics from their website. They changed the web page.

Thank you. That's exactly the sort of thing I was after.

It was announced in the council's weekly newsletter today. Apparently the council have just approved the pledge, and it will be formally launched soon. So hopefully there will be time to get it changed before then!

Not sure who to email, but thought I might as well start off by going straight to the leader of the council.

It may be worth inquiring in an innocent kind of way where it was that they got that list from that is misrepresenting the law? Because I'll bet it was off training materials and I bet they haven't realised they've been Had.

Hope you'll come back and update us RockaLock.

Good point Artichoke, there's a lot of laziness in our public services administration.

Leader of the Council sounds good OP and it might be worth copying in your MP, the Mayor if you have one and you could also write to Michael Gove who is Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government. as of 23 Sept 2021. I will do some writing to ask why we have Local Authorities misinterpreting the law.

Email sent!

I'll let you know what they say.