Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch has called for the repeal of the Public Sector Equality Duty, the section of the 2010 Equality Act that requires public bodies — schools, hospitals, councils — to demonstrate “due regard” to promoting equality of opportunity. The proposal, described by the party as “the first step in a programme to restore common sense,” would leave individual discrimination protections intact while removing the institutional obligation that has generated a large compliance industry and given courts the power to strike down public spending decisions on equality grounds. Badenoch acknowledged during the speech that she had failed to push for the duty’s removal during her own time as equalities minister, saying her letters on compliance were “ignored.” Labour responded by announcing a new civil service diversity strategy focused on working-class representation, and accused Badenoch of wanting to “repeal a duty which stops pregnant women being sacked” — a characterisation Conservatives disputed. Reform UK called the proposal “too little, too late.”
The received wisdom
The liberal and centre-left response to Badenoch’s announcement is predictable, and not entirely wrong. The PSED has real history: the Equality and Human Rights Commission used it to find the Home Office non-compliant in its treatment of the Windrush generation. Courts used it to protect library services from being cut without proper equality impact assessments. These are not trivial applications. Disability rights groups, who depend on the institutional obligation more than on individual complaint mechanisms, have said they “disagree profoundly” with the proposal. The Equality and Human Rights Commission itself says the duty is “not a barrier to doing jobs” but helps organisations “make good decisions.”
The political critique goes further: Badenoch is accused of fighting a culture war at a moment when the Conservative Party’s credibility on economic competence is in tatters, and of positioning herself between Labour and Reform in a way that satisfies neither. The Lib Dems call it “a desperate attempt to fan the flames of culture war politics.” There is also an internal inconsistency that critics have noted: if the duty was producing the harms Badenoch describes, why did she not act on it when she had the power?
A different read
These criticisms have force, but they avoid the substantive question Badenoch is actually raising, which is a serious one.
The PSED was introduced in 2010 to consolidate a patchwork of existing equality legislation and embed a proactive institutional culture in public bodies. The intention was sound. But the implementation has produced outcomes that go well beyond what the drafters contemplated. Public bodies now maintain large equality, diversity and inclusion teams whose primary function is PSED compliance documentation rather than service delivery. Legal challenges under the duty have been used not to remedy obvious discrimination but to slow or block spending decisions — including, in some cases, decisions that would have benefited disadvantaged communities more than the equality impact assessment process they generated.
Badenoch’s core argument — that “equality law properly designed should protect us all in the same way. It should be a shield, not a sword” — is a distinction with genuine intellectual content. The sword-versus-shield distinction maps onto a real tension in equality law: between negative rights (the state must not discriminate against you) and positive duties (the state must actively pursue equal outcomes). The first is relatively stable, well-defined, and enjoys broad cross-partisan legitimacy. The second is contested, open-ended, and has generated a compliance culture that many frontline public servants — teachers, nurses, social workers — find burdensome and mission-displacing.
The historical context matters here. The PSED emerged from a period of genuine institutional racism in British public life — the Macpherson report, Windrush, the documented failures of police and social services. The duty was a response to those failures. But the question is whether the particular instrument — an institutional equality duty with teeth in court — is the best long-term architecture for addressing the underlying problem. Badenoch’s suggestion that “public bodies have spent so long worrying about institutional racism that they have become institutionally incompetent” is rhetorically provocative, but the underlying point — that compliance culture can crowd out operational effectiveness — is not a right-wing fantasy. It is a documented phenomenon in public administration.
Labour’s counter-move — a civil service diversity strategy focused on working-class representation — is actually more interesting than its announcement suggested. Socio-economic background is not a protected characteristic under the Equality Act, which means it has always been the orphan of British equality law. If Labour is genuinely shifting emphasis toward class-based disadvantage, that is a substantive policy evolution, not merely a rebranding. It also implicitly concedes some of Badenoch’s argument: that the protected-characteristics framework, with its PSED compliance apparatus, has not adequately served the people it was meant to help.
The real debate here is not about racism or discrimination — it is about institutional design. The question is whether a court-enforceable duty on public bodies produces better outcomes for disadvantaged groups than a combination of strong individual protections and accountable governance. That is an empirical question, and the evidence is genuinely mixed.
What to watch
Watch whether the Conservatives introduce a formal Private Member’s Bill or manifesto commitment to repeal the PSED, which would force Labour to defend it in detail and reveal the genuine complexity behind the compliance apparatus. Watch for any legal challenges under the PSED in the coming weeks that Badenoch can point to as evidence of the dysfunction she describes. And watch the polling: Badenoch’s positioning between Labour and Reform is precarious, and the question is whether this proposal attracts centre-right voters who are uncomfortable with both sides’ current framing, or simply confirms the perception that the Conservatives remain trapped in culture-war territory while the country wants economic leadership.
— J