Your legal obligations under the Equality Act 2010: a guide for businesses
If you run a business or manage premises the public use, the Equality Act 2010 places duties on you that most owners know exist and far fewer could describe accurately. This guide sets out what the Act actually requires, what a reasonable adjustment is, how far the duty goes, and what to do about it.
What the Equality Act 2010 replaced
The Act came into force in October 2010 and brought together the Disability Discrimination Act and a long list of other equality legislation under a single framework. If you have older guidance on your shelf referring to the DDA, the principles will look familiar but the wording no longer matches the law.
Disability is one of nine protected characteristics under the Act. What makes it different in practice is the duty to make reasonable adjustments, which applies to disability alone. No comparable positive duty attaches to the other characteristics.
What the reasonable adjustments duty actually requires
The duty has three parts, and businesses tend to know about the second and forget the other two.
The first concerns your ways of doing things. Where a policy, practice or procedure puts a disabled person at a substantial disadvantage, you have to take reasonable steps to change it. A no dogs rule that excludes assistance dogs is the standard example, but booking systems, ID requirements and queueing arrangements catch people out just as often.
The second concerns physical features. Where a feature of your premises puts a disabled person at a substantial disadvantage, you have to take reasonable steps to remove it, alter it, or provide a reasonable means of avoiding it. Steps, door widths, counter heights, lighting and floor surfaces all fall in here.
The third concerns auxiliary aids and services. Where a disabled person would be at a substantial disadvantage without one, you have to take reasonable steps to provide it. Information in accessible formats sits here, as does a portable ramp, a hearing loop, or a member of staff available to assist.
Substantial has a specific meaning in the Act. It means more than minor or trivial, which is a lower bar than the everyday use of the word suggests.
The duty is anticipatory
This is the part that catches businesses out. As a service provider you are expected to think ahead about the barriers disabled people might face and deal with them in advance. You don’t get to wait until someone turns up, struggles, and complains. The Equality and Human Rights Commission provides detailed guidance for service providers on this anticipatory duty and how the reasonable adjustments requirements work in practice.
In practice that means reviewing your premises, your policies and your information before anyone raises a problem. It is also why an audit carried out in advance is a considerably better position to be in than a set of adjustments made in a hurry after a complaint.
What counts as reasonable
The Act does not require you to do everything imaginable. It requires what is reasonable, and reasonableness depends on your circumstances. The questions worth asking are these.
The type of business you run and what your customers need from it
The size of the business and its financial resources
The cost of the adjustment set against those resources
How practical the adjustment is to carry out
How much disruption it would cause while the work is done
How much difference it would make to disabled customers and employees
A small independent shop and a national retailer will land in different places on the same question, and the Act allows for that. What it does not allow is deciding nothing is reasonable without having thought about it.
One rule is fixed rather than a matter of judgement: except in very limited circumstances, you cannot ask a disabled person to pay for the cost of a reasonable adjustment.
Your duties as an employer
The same duty applies to your employees and to people applying for jobs with you (although this duty can be reactive rather than proactive). Where a disabled employee is at a substantial disadvantage, whether through the way the work is organised, the premises, or the absence of equipment, you have to consider what would remove that disadvantage.
Recruitment carries a specific restriction. It is unlawful to ask job applicants about their health or disability before shortlisting or offering a role, with limited exceptions such as questions about whether an applicant needs an adjustment to attend an interview.
The business case for getting it right
Compliance is the floor rather than the reason to act. Disabled people and their households represent a substantial part of the UK consumer market, and an inaccessible building or website removes you from consideration before a purchasing decision is ever made. The decision is rarely announced. People simply go elsewhere and take the recommendations of family and friends with them.
The ageing population points the same way. Many of the adjustments that help a disabled customer also help an older one, a parent with a pushchair, or someone recovering from an injury. Accessible premises are easier for everyone to use, which is the argument behind inclusive design. Our OTs consider relevant guidance and standards, including Approved Document M and BS 8300, alongside how people will actually use the building.
How an access audit helps
A disability access audit is the most direct way of finding out where you stand. An access auditor goes through your premises against the relevant standards and against how disabled people will actually use the building, then reports on what is working, what is not, and what to do about it.
A useful audit report separates the changes that cost nothing from the ones that need a budget and puts them in an order you can work through rather than handing you an undifferentiated list. It also gives you a record that you assessed the position and acted on it, which matters if your approach is ever questioned.
Our access audit of a dental surgery shows what this looks like in a specific setting. If you want to start with the changes most businesses can make immediately, we have practical access tips for smaller businesses.
How we work
Inclusion’s access auditors are Occupational Therapists, which means the assessment starts from how people with different conditions actually move through and use a building rather than from a checklist of measurements alone. We work with retailers, visitor attractions, professional practices, local authorities and other organisations across the UK.
If you want to know where your premises stand, talk to our access audit team and we will explain what an audit involves and what it would cost.