Equalities Legislation
In Bracknell Forest, particularly for the Council there is a plethora of legislation around community cohesion issues. Over the last couple of years a number of new pieces of equality related legislation came into force. These are:
- The Disability Discrimination (Amendment) Act 2005 that places a duty on all public authorities to have due regard to promote disability equality when carrying out their functions;
- The Equality Act 2006 which places a duty on all public authorities to have due regard to promote gender equality when carrying out their functions.
- The Equality Act 2006 that also outlaws discrimination on the grounds of a person's faith or sexual orientation in terms of any goods, facilities and services they receive;
- The Employment Equality (Age) Regulations 2006 that outlaws discrimination on the grounds of a person's age in the workplace
The revised Equality Standard for Local Government was published in June 2007 and the Commission for Racial Equality's revised Code of Practice for Housing came into force in October 2006. The Equality Standard was replaced in April 2009 by the Equality Framework for Local Government, the new equality performance management framework. It is in this context that we have decided to align this Community Cohesion Strategy with our equalities duties. The Council has a corporate Equality Policy in place in addition to this strategy.
All of these pieces of legislation have implications for a local authority such as Bracknell Forest and have resulted in the production of separate documents such as the Equality Policy, Gender Equality Scheme, Race Equality Scheme and Disability Equality Scheme. However, although there are separate pieces of legislation, with differing requirements, the Council considers it appropriate and sensible to group these documents together as a ‘family’ under the umbrella of All of Us, the Community Cohesion strategy. In this way we can co-ordinate our activities and monitoring of our actions to achieve the varying objectives.
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