Peers raise questions about Equality Act 2010 Code of Practice

[IwantToRetire]

• “The draft Code covers the provision of single-sex services and outlines the circumstances in which it may be legitimate to ask individuals to provide confirmation that they are of the eligible sex or to exclude individuals from accessing such services. Given that decisions to question individuals may be based on appearance, but that there is no official record or document in the UK which provides reliable evidence of sex, how will this work in practice?

• The costs associated with necessary changes to service user facilities such as toilets and changing rooms will impact a range of organisations that provide services or public functions. How will the impact on the services sector, small businesses and voluntary bodies in particular be monitored?

• The draft Code may have a negative impact on those with the protected characteristic of gender reassignment and on relations between people who share particular protected characteristics and those who do not. How will the impacts on groups and relations between groups be monitored?

• To bring the draft Code into effect two further instruments are required: an order to commence the new Code and another to revoke the existing Code. Why has the existing Code not yet been revoked and what is the timetable for laying the revocation order and bringing the revised Code into force?”

Extracts only https://www.localgovernmentlawyer.co.uk/governance/396-governance-news/100846-peers-raise-questions-about-equality-act-2010-code-of-practice

Oh FFS 🤦‍♀️. Surely someone somewhere in Parliament knows that this merely interprets the law? That changing or blocking this will not change the law?

To their points:

(i) People will use their eyes (as we did pre-2010)

(ii) Many small cafes and other businesses open to the public have one, universal toilet. The code is clear that this is entirely acceptable so there will be no net cost to these businesses. Organisations that have inappropriately labelled toilets as mixed sex without appropriate adaptations may be required to amend this. All costs should be proportionate (and, as an aside, I don’t remember anyone complaining about the cost of adapting toilets to include special men).

(iii) Sounds like they are confusing this code with the Public Sector Equality Duty

(iv) This one sounds sensible

Who are these people "The cross-party House of Lords Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee"

Do they have any power or is it just a talking shop.

Its depressing that so many people are "in all honesty" making such heavy weather of this.

Almost as if they are scared to say, the guidelines will ensure single sex provision.

• The draft Code may have a negative impact on those with the protected characteristic of gender reassignment and on relations between people who share particular protected characteristics and those who do not. How will the impacts on groups and relations between groups be monitored?

So now they are bothered about monitoring ‘impacts on groups’? Shame they didn’t think of that when the whole country was being rearranged to suit special men. Did they raise that question at the previous and actually unlawful guidance?

there are still questions that need to be answered on several aspects of the draft Code, including in relation to its practical operation, cost implications for organisations, and impacts on particular groups.

I think the SC ruling dealt with the impacts quite comprehensively. For the practicals and cost implications, that's the Government's problem to solve for businesses, if there are any issues that have not already been identified. You'd think that maybe they'd have been putting some effort into that, seeing as they've had more than a year.

It is therefore important that the Government addresses the questions posed in our report.

Absolutely agree with this! This is what government is for- what has Bridget and her team been doing all this time? (don't bother to answer that)

That's nice.

Still doesn't change the law.

There's plenty of TRAs in the HoL.

There's also members like Baroness Nicholson, one of the many who remind me regularly why it's absolutely crucial to have a second chamber that is not entirely controlled by insane activist politicians who are anti democracy, have no ethics, don't understand their own jobs judging by that farce of a meeting with MA Stevenson, and only like laws that further their own agendas.

The more I listen to the burbling, the more I'm convinced that few if any of the ones doing it ever read the SCJ at all.

Well, it's studied and selective stupidity.

Next we will have a committee to examine the exact mechanisms for the wielding and use of a biro to sign the fucking Guidance off with. How can we be sure what angle the pen should take? What about ink flow? Has anyone conducted a study into the risk of blots and Tippexability?

but that there is no official record or document in the UK which provides reliable evidence of sex

So now they’ve realised how stupid it is to enable falsification of official documents?

Still doesn't change the law.

Completely agree, however the guidance was supposed to make it easier for everyone to understand the law so that they would know what was legal and what was not legal. It has spectacularly not done this, because

a) hardly anyone appears to have read it
b) if they have read it, they pretend to not understand it
c) if they pretend to have read it, they won't understand it
d) the guidance is a mess of unnecessarily complicated examples, with some unlawful "extras" thrown in by Bridget and her overzealous minions

All the guidance needs to say is "read the SC judgement and follow the law."

Do they realise how fucking dumb they are? It doesn't change the law. They could interfere politically with the EHRC and completely undermine it (this is not good for ALL human rights in the UK) rewrite the guidance. But this wouldn't change the law. You would end up with a new version of 'Stonewall Law' - bollocks advice which is utterly useless and exposed you to significant financial and reputational risk if taken to court.

The only thing it achieved is to intimidate and silence a lot of women and gay people and remove their human rights by the backdoor because they don't have the means or ability to challenge someone breaking the law.

At which point the very concept of the Equality Act collapses and plays directly into Reforms hands.

So happy days. They are beyond fucking stupid. The are contemptuous.

The only thing it achieved is to intimidate and silence a lot of women and gay people and remove their human rights by the backdoor because they don't have the means or ability to challenge someone breaking the law.

For some in Parliament and in Government, this seems to be the goal, and nothing but this will satisfy them. Women-hating, and I suspect self-hating, grifters. No one who is living a happy, fulfilled, normal life with many interests would bother to obstruct the rights of half the population to equality, because they just wouldn't think of it, or care.

Some deeply unhappy, disturbed, self-hating people are pushing this agenda.

The draft Code may have a negative impact on those with the protected characteristic of gender reassignment and on relations between people who share particular protected characteristics and those who do not. How will the impacts on groups and relations between groups be monitored?

Oh good grief are we really being run as a country by people this gormless?

how do they think it's impacted on relationships between trans identified men and women who need single sex spaces over the last 5 years while the govt looked the other way and let women and gay rights be trampled? How is being affected while they do nothing, and how will it go on being affected if they insist on destroying women and gay rights? Because the body count of women in court cases including the assaulted and raped will go on climbing and the next Isla Bryson case is only ever 24 hours away.

Can we say 'toxic debate'? If we say it very slowly with some pictures?

The impression is increasingly that you couldn't employ these people to run a bloody paper round.

Re-read your Burke, Lords and Ladies!
In that state some shade of doubt will always rest on these questions, when they are pursued with great subtilty. But the very habit of stating these extreme cases is not very laudable or safe; because, in general, it is not right to turn our duties into doubts. They are imposed to govern our conduct, not to exercise our ingenuity; and therefore our opinions about them ought not to be in a state of fluctuation, but steady, sure, and resolved.
from [Appeal from Old to New Whigs]

'[Laws] are imposed to govern our conduct, not to exercise our ingenuity'
Love it!😁

Hmm. Apart from the obvious performative stupidity, the majority of comments I hear from civvies and read on social media grasp the basic principle pretty well:

Men are not allowed in women's spaces or services.

Again, most of what I hear and see across different platforms is roughly 'no shit sherlock'.

Most people are getting very tired of politicians railing about the rights of transvestites.

And much as activists try to use the most emotive and extreme terms possible, most people are not buying the idea that cross dressers are suicidal over permission to use women's changing rooms. The hyperbole has worked against them. Its not a 'genocide' to say that men must use men's toilets.

The EHRC toilets example is not good for women and children. It doesn’t make sense for anyone in terms of health and safety. Between the draft and the end result, the wording in the toilet example actually got worse as it included a line about safety risks for which I can find no evidence.

The EHRC conflated privacy with safety. This could only have come from people wanting ‘inclusive’ design. Women only cubicles (with the traditional door gap) are the safest design of non domestic toilet for women. If you allow men in, the design has to change so the toilet is private. And vice versa for men’s toilets.

From Hansard:
Equality Act 2010, Code of Practice
Volume 786, debated on Monday 1 June 2026, The Minister for Equalities:
‘in the majority of cases, we are talking about changing signs on existing facilities or updating them so that they are fully enclosed’.

Since I sent them my report (updated until April), at least two more men have been convicted of raping young women in enclosed non domestic toilets/toilet rooms.

It is very depressing that their example has the real-life consequences and is the opposite of designing-out crime and poor medical incident outcomes, decreasing health and safety of toilet provision in general.

From Hansard:
Equality Act 2010, Code of Practice
Volume 786, debated on Monday 1 June 2026, The Minister for Equalities:
‘in the majority of cases, we are talking about changing signs on existing facilities or updating them so that they are fully enclosed’.

Apart from everything else that is wrong with all of that⬆there's the off-hand glibness of 'or updating them so that they are fully enclosed'.

If regulations are going to be adhered to, in reality this means removing old facilities and replacing them with a whole new building-regs compliant 'universal' toilets.
That's a huge amount of disruption and expense, but it's put alongside 'changing signs' as if it was nothing.

I'm straying into KTS's area of expertise here, but when facilities are updated so that they are fully enclosed, does that not inevitably reduce the total amount of toilets available per occupant/user of the building?
If an existing women's toilet has, say, 5 cubicles, and the adjacent men's has X cubicles and Y urinals, will there be an equivalent number of new fully enclosed mixed sex toilets?

Most people are getting very tired of politicians railing

And pretending that things perfectly easily understandable to any member of the public is 'soooo complicated' meaning 'I don't like that law and don't want to follow it (but absolutely expect you to follow the laws whether you like them or not)'.

And then they wonder why this country is getting so difficult to govern.

Yes. Politicians are now seeing the public response of 'I dont think you are mate'. I'm not saying this is a good thing, to be clear. But treat a populace with contempt and you'll inevitably get it back in kind.

According to AI...

Several members of the House of Lords have spoken out regarding the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) guidance on single-sex facilities. Peers generally fall into two camps: those advocating for women's rights to separate spaces, and those concerned that the guidance fails to protect trans individuals.

Key peers involved in debates and parliamentary scrutiny regarding the code of practice include:

Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab): As Chair of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, he voiced concerns about the draft code, stating that despite outlining obligations, it still raises questions on its practical operation, cost implications, and impacts on particular groups.

Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl): Has been vocal about defending single-sex spaces based on biological sex, advocating strongly for women's right to these facilities and raising concerns about individuals being silenced.

Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab): The government’s equalities spokesperson has faced scrutiny regarding his involvement in discussions with a group of peers. This group reportedly expressed concerns that the EHRC's approach may negatively impact transgender people.

Other Scrutiny Peers: A cross-party group of peers involved in pushing for clarity and addressing balance/equality impact assessments includes Lord Cashman (Lab), Baroness Barker (LD), Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab), and Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom (Con).

And for info, here is the transcript of the Q&A session (of the Women and Equalities committee) - with Mary Ann Stephensen and John Kirkpatrick:

https://committees.parliament.uk/oralevidence/17691/html/

A cross-party group of peers involved in pushing for clarity and addressing balance/equality impact assessments

So NOW they want balance and EIAs! Too bloody late, that ship has sailed. Where were the calls for "balance" when women were on the sharp end of this catastrophe?

It's good to ask these questions. Eventually they are going to get to the answer that we all know - a very small group of men will have to just suck it up.

Just like people with disabilities and parents with babies, they will have to plan their day around facilities that can accommodate them. We've been doing it all our lives.

Mothers do not leave their baby unsupervised in a shop whilst they try on clothes, or use the toilet, - they have to shop where facilities are big enough to accommodate a pram or buggy.

No one can now legitimately argue that men should be able to self identify into female only single sex spaces. That ship has sailed.

Yep and it doesn’t fit in with Approved building control regulations. It also will be difficult in terms of positioning as universal toilets should really lead off to a primary circulation route.