NHS: Single-sex Spaces for Staff

Baroness Jenkin of Kennington Excerpts

Thursday 1st May 2025 Grand Committee

[Baroness Jenkin of Kennington (Con)]

My Lords, until the blink of an eye ago, it would have been considered extraordinary to have a debate about whether staff changing rooms in the NHS should be mixed-sex spaces. Many have been unaware of the challenges, including legal challenges, currently taking place in our health system regarding staff single-sex spaces; we are talking about staff with regard to the Supreme Court case. I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Arbuthnot for bringing this debate forward.

As others have said, the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 mandate employers to provide separate facilities for men and women, including changing rooms, for reasons of propriety. These rules and the Equality Act have been misinterpreted by the NHS, particularly affecting female employees, who make up approximately 76% of the NHS staff in England. The situation has been confused by the NHS Confederation guidance, which says:

“In all types of workplaces, trans and non-binary people should be supported to use the bathrooms they feel most comfortable using. At no time is it appropriate to force staff to use the toilet associated with their assigned sex at birth against their will”.


Incidentally—as language matters—sex is not assigned at birth. It is observed or registered. It is not a choice.

The guidance also tells management, senior healthcare leaders and HR directors to take a “zero-tolerance attitude” to transphobia. It is this approach which has led to NHS staff facing workplace discipline for asserting their basic rights to privacy and dignity, as well as to single-sex facilities, at work. Although in Scotland, the case of Sandie Peggy, as mentioned before, is particularly egregious: a nurse with a 30-year unblemished record was suspended by NHS Fife after complaining about having to share a changing room with a trans woman. The case continues but, with a budget black hole of £30 million and a cost to the tribunal that must run into hundreds of thousands of pounds, surely NHS Fife should now accept that NHS staff such as Nurse Peggy deserve privacy, dignity and safety, which the original regulations and the Supreme Court judgment have now clarified as it applies to workplaces.

In Darlington, nurses were forced to share the women’s changing room with a male nurse who identifies as a woman. How astonishing it was to hear that, when they raised their concerns, the Darlington nurses were told to “be educated” and to “broaden their mindset”. This focus has meant that sexual harassment in the workplace has been ignored. Managers are no longer offered training on the issues of abuse, which women have traditionally experienced in the workplace. Female staff are leaving as a result, as their concerns, including around bullying and intimidation, are no longer taken seriously.

The current guidance encourages NHS employers to uphold policies that create an intimidating, hostile and difficult environment for staff who do not wish to share single-sex spaces with members of the opposite sex. I ask the Minister to join with Sex Matters, which has written to the chief executive of the NHS Confederation, in urging it that its current guidance is unlawful and should be withdrawn as a matter of urgency.