Each day we are publishing a blog on one of the policies from our Spending Plan. Click here to read the previous policy.
According to its impact analysis, the Equality Act 2010 has an estimated annual cost to both the public and private sectors of up to £70 million. This law should be repealed as it places burdens on small businesses to familiarise themselves with the law and to ensure that they act in compliance with it causing a loss in productivity. This is also the case in the public sector where the annual cost is estimated to be between £7 million and £41 million.
The impact assessment made for the Act suggests that each of the 25,612 public bodies would be expected to have a personnel manager under whose remit the implementation of the Act falls. The average wage for such a person is expected to be £25.13 and assuming a 38 hour working week the total remuneration for one person at each of these bodies in one year would be close to £1.3 billion. Given this, it seems to be an underestimation that the act would only cost the public sector £7 million per year, equivalent to slightly over 0.5 per cent of these employees time. Thus we have taken the highest estimate for costs.
The costs (if grown in line with CPI inflation) would be £49 million in 2020–21. As already stated this is likely to be a gross understatement, and does not include the costs to the private sector.