The employment provisions of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 create a new set of rights between people with disabilities and commercial lessors.

There is the novel prospect of lessors being joined as respondents to industrial tribunal proceedings.

Employment lawyers have started to consider how to advise clients about disability issues.

In addition, solicitors who employ more than 20 people, and who are not freeholders, will be subject to a fresh set of obligations towards existing staff and job applicants.This is a logical extension of the 'section 6 duties'.

S 6 imposes duties on employers of more than 20 people to make reasonable adjustments to their premises and working arrangements in relation to disability.

The duty arises when there is a recruitment, or if there is any question of a benefit of employment being available.

This duty is not owed to the public, but only to an actual disabled applicant for employment or to an individual employee with a disability.The obligations that this places on an employer will depend on a case-by-case and fact-by-fact approach.

In general, an employer has a duty to prevent any physical feature of the workplace, or any part of the working arrangements, from placing a disabled person at a disadvantage in comparison with someone without the disability.

S 6(3) gives a list of possible examples, including s 6(3)(a) 'making adjustments to premises', at which point s 16 may come into play.If an employer is a lessee of the wor kplace premises, and not entitled to make the alterations that a particular case requires, s 16(2) operates to amend the employer's lease of the premises.

An employer may make a written request to the lessor for permission to alter the premises, and the lessor cannot withhold consent unreasonably or attach unreasonable conditions to the consent.

If an employer has sought the lessor's consent, and the lessor has ignored the request, refused consent or attached unreasonable conditions to consent, rendering the employer unable to carry out s 6 duties, there is a prima facie case of disability discrimination.The employer has no general defence that it was 'in my lease'.

If the employer has gone through the procedure of asking the lessor in writing for permission to make alterations (sched 4, para 1) then the employer or the employee may ask a tribunal to join the lessor as a party and, provided that the request is made before the start of the hearing, the tribunal must do so.

The tribunals' powers against the lessor are to decide whether there has been unreasonable refusal to consent to the alteration, or whether unreasonable conditions have been attached to the consent.

If the tribunal finds that the lessor has been unreasonable, it may grant a declaration.

It may authorise and order the employer to make the alteration in question, and order the lessor to compensate the employee.

If compensation is ordered against the lessor, it cannot be ordered against the employer.In theory, these provisions are a bold extension of employment law rights and of the jurisdiction of the industrial tribunal.

However, it may be different in practice.

Disability discrimination will be another area of law for which there will be no legal aid.

A tribunal applicant will be unlikely to know about the terms on which an employer occupies premises.

An applicant who claims discrimination by breach of s 6 may be litigating in the dark, complaining of the impact of physical features of premises which he or she has never visited.

It would be naive to assume that there will not be cases where the employer feels that it is a softer option to discriminate against a disabled applicant than to litigate against the lessor.Tribunals may be tempted to look for help in the form of expert evidence.

If there are expert contests, they could involve an applicant in person, an employer who may feel that he or she has been caught in the middle of someone else's dispute, and a commercial lessor with the resources, expertise and commitment to defend the case.When pt III of the Act comes into force on 2 December, similar provisions will apply to service providers who occupy their premises under a lease.

There will be one interesting point of distinction.

In the employment context, the lessor can only be joined to existing discrimination proceedings between employee, or would-be employee, and employer.

But under pt III, there will be a free-standing right under sched 4, para 6 to refer lease questions directly to the county court.

References of this kind will be heard by a court, which will have some experience of dealing with property issues, and where legal aid will, in theory, be available.

However, in such cases, the county court will have no power to order the lessor to pay compensation.