Businesses and service users will be required to make ‘reasonable’ adjustments for disabled people, under the proposed Equality Act.
MLCs unanimously voted to give the Equality Bill its first reading in the Legislative Council last week.
Taking the lengthy and detailed Bill through the upper house, Acting Attorney General John Quinn explained its primary purpose is to ‘ensure vulnerable
people, those in minorities, and the people of the island in general are protected from unjustified discrimination’.
Unjustified discrimination is prohibited on the grounds of age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex and sexual orientation.
Mr Quinn said: ‘I believe that without exception the members of Council will be supportive of the principle that, so far as possible, people should be treated equally and protected from discrimination. I say ‘so far as possible’ because it is simply not practical, and sometimes not desirable, for all people to be treated entirely equally in all situations all of the time.’
The Bill applies to the public, private and voluntary sectors, and it covers all areas of life, including employment, the provision of goods and services and the carrying out of public functions.
Main forms of conduct prohibited under the Bill are direct discrimination, indirect discrimination, harassment, victimisation, and discrimination arising from a disability.
Mr Quinn said the requirement to make reasonable adjustments for disabled persons had elicited the greatest level of support during the consultation on the Bill, but it was also perhaps the area which businesses and service providers had the greatest level of concern in relation to costs.
He said it is not possible to come up with a hard and fast definition of ‘reasonable’ for the purpose of adjustments for disabled people and each case must be considered on its own merits. This would result in some unavoidable uncertainty for organisations, he accepted.
Where there are disagreements. conciliation would be available through the Manx Industrial Relations Services for cases relating to employment, and through the Office of Fair Trading in cases relating to goods and services.
But the Bill will expand the remit of the island’s existing Employment Tribunal and rename it as the Employment and Equality Tribunal for cases where a mutually acceptable position cannot be reached.
David Anderson MLC said he looked forward to ‘common sense’ as ‘clearly there are areas where equality is not sensible’. He said he believed the Equality Bill, which was introduced in LegCo first, should have been considered before the Same Sex Marriage Bill, which got its third reading in the Keys that same day: ‘The cart has been put before the horse.’