On Thursday 10 September, BIHR joined legal practitioners, academics, campaigner and policy experts at Socio-Economic Rights: The Next Chapter, a conference organised by Garden Court Chambers and King’s College London.
The event explored the future of socio-economic rights, including what implementation of the socio-economic duty under Section 1 of the Equality Act 2010 could mean in England. (This duty was never activated when the Equality Act entered into force and has lain dormant for more than 15 years).
The conference came just a day after the UK Government announced a new Class Unit within the Office for Equality and Opportunity, focused on improving the life chances of working-class people, low-income families and disadvantaged communities.
The Government said one of the Unit’s early priorities will be introducing the socio-economic duty, including requiring the Government and named public bodies to consider socio-economic disadvantage when making decisions about areas such as services, transport and budgets.
BIHR’s CEO, Sanchita Hosali, spoke on the conference’s closing panel, bringing BIHR’s perspective on turning human rights into everyday justice.
Drawing on BIHR’s work across health, care, housing, education and welfare, Sanchita highlighted one of the central challenges BIHR sees in practice: the issue is rarely not having the right law, but the gap between the legal protections people have and their everyday experiences. Too often, people do not know they have human rights, while public bodies and their staff may not fully understand or apply the duties they already have under the Human Rights Act.
This experience also shapes BIHR’s approach to the socio-economic duty. Sanchita welcomed conversations about legal protections, while stressing the importance of exploring what difference those protections will make in practice.
The socio-economic duty could strengthen decision-making, encourage public bodies to engage more systematically with disadvantage and create new opportunities for accountability.
At the same time, BIHR’s experience shows that the Human Rights Act is already an important tool in many of these same areas. Across health, care, welfare, education and housing, we see it helping to improve decisions, prevent harm and secure better.
But legal protections do not automatically do not automatically translate into change in people’s lives. Their impact depends on whether decision-makers understand their duties, organisations are equipped to put them into practice, and people are able to use those protections to secure change.
“If economic and social rights are to make a real difference, implementation of current law must receive the same attentions as calls for new legislation.”
Sanchita closed by setting out three priorities from BIHR’s experience: protect and use the Human Rights Act; close the implementation gap; and put implementation alongside calls for legal reform.
There remains enormous untapped potential in the human rights protections we already have. As discussions about the socio-economic duty move forward, ensuring those protections make a practical difference in people’s everyday lives must be at the heart of the conversation.