The Equality Bill - Government response to the Consultation was published on Monday

Chapter 2: A new Equality Duty on public bodies

"We note the strong overall response in favour of extending the Equality Duty to fully cover gender reassignment and to cover the three new strands: age, sexual orientation and religion or belief. We believe the Equality Duty is a key means of tackling systemic discrimination and, led by the public sector, achieving cultural and social change towards greater tolerance and cohesion. This is not a matter of special treatment for minority groups, but of considering the needs of everyone - men and women; people of all ethnic groups; people of any age or sexual orientation and any religion or belief, or none."

Chapter 3: Age discrimination outside the workplace

"The Department of Health is taking a number of steps to tackle age discrimination. These include the work the Care Services Improvement Partnership is doing on older people's mental health services, and the development of a vision for services to succeed the National Service Framework for Mental Health, which covered adults of working age only but expires in 2009. All new policy initiatives are now subject to age equality impact assessments. This process has led, for example, to pilot programmes examining how we can make sure that older people benefit from improved access to psychological therapies. The Individual Budgets pilots have sought to ensure that the budgets offered to individuals to fund social care are not differentiated by age."

The full response is available to download at the link below:

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