It’s open season on Harriet Harman’s Equality Bill, published this week. One newspaper dubbed it ‘unfair on men’ (Metro, 27 April) and another said ‘it’s official: women are (now) more equal than men’ (Daily Mail, 28 April). The Guardian (28 April 2009) alone described it as a welcome, if ‘bold’, move.

What’s the fuss about? The Equality Bill is designed to bring together, into a single bill, 116 pieces of existing equality legislation, while also tackling the pay gap between the genders and broadening the scope of current age discrimination laws.

The outrage has mostly been provoked by the positive action provision in the bill. If the bill becomes law, this will allow employers, when deciding between two or more candidates who are equally suited for the job, to choose to appoint a person from a group that’s under-represented in the workforce. Such positive action is to be voluntary and there will be no quotas to meet.

Critics of the bill have seized upon this as proof the government is encouraging employers to discriminate against men in favour of women or black candidates. Quite why the government should want to do this is unclear.

The government is actually offering employers the flexibility to adjust the balance of their workforce – if that’s what they want to do – by appointing someone from any number of potentially under-represented groupings.

They might want to appoint an older worker to leaven the youth of the rest of the team, for instance. Or vice versa. Or they may want to appoint a male because there are presently too few men on the workforce.

Perhaps many customers come from the Asian community, and so it would make sense for the employer to appoint an Asian who spoke Hindi or Urdu in preference to a monoglot English speaker.

And so forth. It is an employer-friendly provision.

Positive discrimination (as opposed to positive action), however, remains illegal. Positive discrimination is when (to use the above examples) an employer appoints someone simply because they are old, young, male or Asian – irrespective of merit.

Other elements of the bill are also likely to prove controversial. Samantha Mangwana, employment and disability specialist at national firm Russell Jones & Walker, points to the bill applying the concept of indirect discrimination to disability cases. ‘This is untried and could cause problems for employers. People have different disabilities, and so how can employers possibly predict what impact their work practices might have?’

What’s your take on the Equality Bill? How might it impact on your firm? Are we suffering from equality legislation fatigue and should commonsense be allowed free rein? Please post your comments.