Today’s announcement by Kemi Badenoch the Public Sector Equality Duty should be repealed, and not replaced, is a positive step.
It acknowledges this legislation has eroded faith in our public institutions and undermined the very fairness it was meant to ensure.
The strongest case against the duty is rooted in fairness: a simple aversion to one group getting preferential treatment over another.
But there are also more practical examples of its perverse impact – for it has produced outcomes that no reasonable person could defend.
As the Leader of the Opposition said, prison officials recently found themselves in breach of it for separating terrorists from the general population, simply because the affected cohort happened to be predominantly Muslim.
Those terrorists may now be entitled to compensation.
Not because they were wronged or physically harmed, but because a legal framework designed to protect the vulnerable has been contorted to protect the dangerous.
It is, unfortunately, the logical destination of a legal framework that treats equal outcomes as a trump card over common sense, public safety, and institutional effectiveness.
Today’s announcement by Tory leader Kemi Badenoch the Public Sector Equality Duty should be repealed is a positive step
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Over my decade at the Foreign Office, I watched a quieter version of the same dysfunction unfold daily.
Directors-General – the most senior mandarins – were required to act as "Board Sponsors" for race and gender, regardless of their brief.
The equality duty requires public bodies to think about how they can improve society and promote equality in their day-to-day business.
As a result, whole afternoons were given over to events for Black History Month, Windrush Day and what my directorate called "Gender November".
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Officials were summoned to hear how a gender-responsive lens should be applied to our climate and security work.
All of it, we were told, was central to Government priorities.
Even worse, it distorted how people were hired and promoted.
HR departments, encouraged by internal staff networks, stripped appraisals from the promotion process, with the logic being past performance might disadvantage some "protected characteristics" groups.
A system designed to remove bias ended up removing accountability.
Piecemeal reform has been tried and has repeatedly failed.
The culture is to find new training and new initiatives the moment you close one down.
That is why the repeal of the underlying legislation – clean and complete – is the only answer.
With Reform UK also committed to ditching the equality duty – and the whole 2010 Equality Act – we can for the first time hold out a hope the era of this perverse legislation is coming to an end.
But repealing legislation alone will not fix the culture it leaves behind.
At the Centre for Government Reform, our mission is to do exactly that: to rebuild a state that prizes delivery over box-ticking, meritocracy over mediocrity, and the national interest above all else.
That is the hardest task of all. And a task at the Centre we are starting now.
Ameer Kotecha is CEO of the Centre for Government Reform. He was formerly a senior diplomat, serving as the head of the British consulate in Russia between 2023 and 25.
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