The Equality Act 2010 contains a number of exceptions to allow religious organisations – including faith schools and those providing other public services – to discriminate against people on grounds of their religion or belief or sexual orientation. This is unjust and unnecessary.
Unlike the rest of the UK, Northern Ireland does not have a single Equality Act, and has significantly more holes in its equality legislation as a result.
We campaign to strengthen equality law by closing these gaps and removing unfair exemptions.
In depth
We campaign to end Equality Act exemptions primarily as part of our faith schools and public service reform. The Equality Act applies across Britain.
Under the Equality Act, organisations that serve a ‘public function’ have a duty to uphold equality law – known as the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED). This applies to public authorities such as government departments, the NHS, the police, and local authorities. However, in many cases, public authorities outsource their services to private or third sector providers – some of which are highly evangelical religious organisations.
In theory, PSED can extend beyond ‘pure’ public authorities to ‘hybrid public authorities’. These are private or third sector organisations that are carrying out both public functions and private functions. In these cases, service providers must uphold PSED only in respect of those public functions. This gives rise to several concerns:
- The courts have interpreted what constitutes a ‘public authority’ narrowly. This means that it is unclear when a private or third sector provider has to uphold the Public Sector Equality Duty.
- Religious organisations are afforded certain exemptions on grounds of religion or belief and on sexual orientation, some of which are permissible whether they are recognised as serving a public function or not.
When providing a service, a public authority cannot discriminate against, harass, or victimise service users. However, there is an exemption that means it is not considered harassment – ‘unwanted conduct related to a relevant protected characteristic’ – if it relates to the protected characteristics of religion or belief, or of sexual orientation. This means that in receiving a public service, a service user would be unable to claim harassment under the Equality Act if faced with unwanted conduct related to their sexual orientation and/or their religion or belief. They can only claim for direct or indirect discrimination or victimisation should such treatment amount to that.
Additionally, religious organisations are permitted to discriminate on grounds of religion or belief in the employment of their staff, which raises concerns about the impact on the service delivery if candidates can lawfully be selected on grounds of religion or belief, rather than being the best candidate to deliver a publicly funded role.
These concerns have real-world impacts. In 2011 Richmond Council awarded a contract for counselling services for teenagers to the Catholic Children’s Society – replacing Off The Record, a local, inclusive secular charity that had provided the counselling service for the past 20 years. The Catholic Children’s Society had previously given up working with new adopters after the Equality Act (Sexual Orientation) Regulations 2007 came into force, which meant that it would no longer be able to discriminate against same-sex couples wanting to adopt. This gave rise to concerns about its ability to provide inclusive services on issues like homophobic bullying, as well as contraception and abortion, if employees are required to ‘uphold the Catholic ethos’.
In the same week, the Government withdrew funding from pioneering women’s charity Eaves Housing, instead awarding the contract for services to trafficked women to the Salvation Army. The Salvation Army had previously stated it would be ‘impossible’ for it to be ‘religiously neutral’, and at the time the contract was awarded, its position statement condemned homosexual behaviour as ‘self-evidently abnormal’. Then in 2018, an investigation uncovered claims of homophobia and untrained staff at City Hearts, a Sheffield charity subcontracted by the Salvation Army which had been contracted by the Home Office to support victims of modern slavery.
Despite this, the APPG on Faith and Society’s Faith Covenant sets out a voluntary framework on how religious groups and local authorities can work together. Until 2020, this Covenant forbade proselytising in contracts, but it was then revised to remove this explicit prohibition. The APPG encourages local authorities to sign that Covenant, and many have, exacerbating the problems associated with having religious organisations as public service providers.
Equality law in Northern Ireland
The Equality Act does not apply in Northern Ireland. Equality law is instead laid out across various laws such as the Equal Pay Act (Northern Ireland) 1970, the Sex Discrimination (Northern Ireland) Order 1976, the Fair Employment and Treatment (Northern Ireland) Order 1998, Section 75 of the Northern Ireland Act 1998, and the Equality Act (Sexual Orientation) Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2006. Fragmented laws leave people with uneven protection and employers with confusing, overlapping duties – in some cases resulting in weaker protections than those in Britain. We therefore want to see a Single Equality Act in Northern Ireland.
Similar to – but even weaker than – Britain’s PSED, Section 75(1) of the Northern Ireland Act imposes a duty on public authorities in Northern Ireland to have ‘due regard’ for the need to promote equal opportunities between people with different characteristics including ‘religious beliefs’ and sexual orientation. Notwithstanding the exclusive language (the non-religious can and should be included with a section 3 ‘reading in’ of the Human Rights Act 1998, which applies to the whole of the UK), what constitutes a ‘public authority’ is even more narrowly defined, limited to the specified list of departments, corporations, bodies, and authorities listed under Section 75(3). This means that if a public function is outsourced to a private or third sector organisation, employees and service users are not automatically or directly protected by Section 75.
Some of these risks however are mitigated by a patchwork of legislation. For example, under regulation 16 of the Sexual Orientation Regulations, religion or belief organisations can lawfully restrict participation in the organisations’ activities, the provision of goods, facilities, and services, and/or the use of its premises on grounds of sexual orientation in order to comply with the doctrine of the organisation, or to avoid conflict with the strongly held religious convictions of a significant number of the religion’s followers. However, that same regulation stipulates that these exemptions do not apply if the organisation is providing a service for a public authority.
Strengthening equality law
There are several ways in which we wish to see the UK’s current human rights settlement strengthened:
- The UK Government should amend the Equality Act to require recruitment of the best candidate to deliver a public service, rather than permitting selection on grounds of religion or belief in public service provision, and to prevent discrimination against service users.
- The Northern Ireland Assembly should legislate for a comprehensive Single Equality Act that consolidates and modernises all equality law.
- In England, the ‘socio-economic duty’ found in the Equality Act 2010 should be commenced. In Northern Ireland, pursue equivalent legislation via the Assembly.
- The Equality Act provisions on caste discrimination should be brought into force, as should equivalent provisions in Northern Ireland.
What we’re doing
We are the only religion or belief organisation that is a full member of Equally Ours, the national coalition of groups interested in equality.
We regularly call for an end to religious discrimination, from domestic bodies such as the Equality and Human Rights Commission to international ones, such as the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.
In response to a 2025 consultation we highlighted the need to recognise a broader range of organisations as ‘public authorities’ for the purpose of the Public Sector Equality Duty to the Office for Equality and Opportunity.
We also campaign to end Equality Act exemptions as part of our faith schools and public service reform.
We support campaigns for such an Act. We also support proposals for a Northern Ireland ‘Bill of Rights’ to supplement the UK Human Rights Act 1998, taking into account the particular rights-based issues faced in Northern Ireland due to the religious divisions of the past.
Appendix: Past work on this issue
- In 2007, we published our report on the contracting out of public services to religious organisations, Quality and Equality: Human Rights, Public Services and Religious Organisations, which discusses and sets out in detail our position.
- During the Equality Act 2010’s passage through Parliament, we worked closely with a range of organisations as well as our supporters in Parliament to have amendments made to the Bill that sought to increase protection against discrimination for humanists and others, and to minimise the exceptions from the law granted to religious organisations. However, the Equality Act still contains exemptions that we continue to campaign against.
- In 2015, we were part of the working group on and submitted evidence to the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s review of the place of religion and belief in the workplace, with the subsequent evidence finding many complaining about ‘unwelcome “preaching” or proselytising, and the expression of views that were hurtful or derogatory towards other faiths and/or towards lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people’ – including in public service provision.