Draft Equality (Race and Disability) Bill: Public Consultation

Seema Malhotra Excerpts

Tuesday 18th March 2025 Written Statements

[The Minister for Equalities (Seema Malhotra)]

This Government are committed to ensuring that equality and opportunity are at the heart of our programme for national renewal. Our plan for change sets out the ambitious—but achievable—milestones we aim to reach by the end of this Parliament. The work we are doing will improve the lives of working people and strengthen our country.

The manifesto and King’s Speech last July announced our intention to legislate to deliver mandatory ethnicity and disability pay gap reporting for larger employers. These measures will help employers identify and tackle pay disparities across their workforces, remove barriers to opportunity for ethnic minority and disabled staff and support our plan for change in driving up household income for all.

Today we are launching a public consultation in support of this. Responses to the consultation will help shape the pay gap reporting measures that we will include in the draft Equality (Race and Disability) Bill, to be published later in this Session.

We are particularly interested to hear from those who will be impacted by these proposals, including employers, representative bodies, trade unions, race and disability stakeholders, ethnic minority and disabled people, and disabled people’s organisations.

We are considering what other measures the draft Bill could incorporate, including through a call for evidence which will be published separately. The call for evidence will include consideration of how we make the right to equal pay effective for ethnic minority and disabled people.

We are also announcing today that we are establishing a race equality engagement group to help us develop further measures to tackle race inequality. This group, which will be chaired by Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon, will enable us to work closely with communities and stakeholders to find out what matters most to them.

A copy of the consultation document will be placed in the Libraries of both Houses and will be available on gov.uk.

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