Conservatives announce plan to root out identity politics from our public services

• Conservatives will scrap the Public Sector Equality Duty, removing the legal foundation that has allowed identity politics, DEI bureaucracy and ideological box-ticking to spread across public services.

• The policy is the first step in a wider Conservative programme to restore common sense across public life, which Kemi Badenoch will set out in a major speech today.

• Police officers should be catching criminals, NHS staff should be treating patients and public servants should be delivering for taxpayers, not being dragged into identity politics.

Today [Tuesday 9 June 2026], the Conservatives have announced plans to overhaul the Equality Act and scrap the Public Sector Equality Duty.

The announcement comes as Kemi Badenoch prepares to set out her first steps as part of a wider plan to remove identity politics from public institutions and restore the principle of equality under the law in a major speech today.

Britain should be a country where every person is treated fairly as an individual. But across too many of our public institutions, that basic principle has been eroded. People are increasingly divided into competing identity groups, while public bodies spend time and taxpayers' money on DEI bureaucracy, box-ticking and ideological schemes.

The Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED) has helped fuel this culture. Its expansive and open-ended requirements have encouraged public bodies to gold-plate their processes to demonstrate compliance and protect themselves from legal challenge. From the Bank of England taking Winston Churchill off banknotes, to police training that tells officers not to treat people the same, public bodies are using PSED to advance dangerous and divisive agendas.

The result is that public services are too often distracted from the jobs they were created to do. Police officers should be focused on catching criminals. NHS staff should be focused on treating patients. Public servants should be focused on delivering the services taxpayers rely on.

The duty has also encouraged public bodies to adopt initiatives such as unconscious-bias training and identity-based programmes that do more harm than good. In some cases, equality processes have even been allowed to compromise important decisions involving public safety and the management of dangerous offenders.

As Equalities Minister, Kemi Badenoch wrote to all public bodies, and held meetings with many of them, in which she demanded they rein in activists' expansive use of the Equality Act – particularly in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement. Several years on, we are still seeing regular examples of public bodies treating people as groups, rather than individuals, which shows that action needs to be taken.

This is why the Conservatives will overhaul the Equality Act to scrap the Public Sector Equality Duty. Every citizen should be treated fairly as an individual, without favour or prejudice. Public institutions should serve the whole country equally, rather than dividing people into groups and treating them differently according to their identity.

The plan follows Kemi Badenoch announcing a Culture and Integration Commission in March this year, including an overhaul of the Equality Act. The first stage of this work has been supported by barrister Andrew Dinsmore, whose advice to repeal the PSED will be published alongside Badenoch's speech.

In her speech, Kemi Badenoch will set why the Conservative approach is the right one: rejecting tribal politics from both the left and the right, restoring common sense across public life and ensuring every citizen is treated equally under the law.

Labour are moving in the opposite direction. They want to impose further DEI reporting requirements on employers, creating more paperwork, more costs and more distractions from the priorities of hard-working families.

Reform say they would simply abolish the Equality Act altogether, which would open the floodgates to more DEI and affirmative action in workplaces and services in the public and private sectors. Once again, this shows Reform have not done the detailed policy work required before making an announcement.

The Conservatives have taken a serious and workable approach. Under Kemi Badenoch's leadership, the party has spent months carrying out the detailed work needed to restore common sense across public life.

This is the Conservative principle of universalism: every citizen treated fairly as an individual, every public institution focused on serving the whole country and one law for all.

Claire Coutinho MP, Shadow Minister for Equalities, said:

“The Conservatives believe in judging people by the content of their character, not the colour of their skin. We need to take identity politics out of public life and bring back common sense, fairness, and equality before the law.

“Our public services should be focused on doing their jobs and keeping the public safe – not pandering to radical ideologies and pushing diversity and inclusion training which does more harm than good.

“We will amend the Equality Act to stop public services like the police and NHS spending precious time and resources on contested ideas about race, sex and gender and more time on the priorities of the British public.”

ENDS

Notes to Editors

• The public sector equality duty (PSED) is a statutory duty on listed public authorities and other bodies carrying out public functions. ‘The duty ensures that those organisations consider how their functions will affect people with different protected characteristics. These functions include their policies, programmes, and services... It also requires public bodies to monitor the actual impact of the things they do. For example, to keep under review how different groups of pupils are performing at school and to identify and take action if some pupils with protected characteristics need more support than others.' GEO, Public Sector Equality Duty: Guidance for public authorities, 18 December 2023, link).

• The general duty calls for ‘due regard to the need to foster good relations.' This general duty means decision-makers should have regard to the need to eliminate conduct prohibited by the act, advance equality of opportunity, and foster good relations in policy formulation, consultations and provision of public services ( Equality Act 2010, Part 11, Chapter 1, link).

•  The general duty is contained within section 149 to 157 of the Equality Act 2010. The Equality Act received Royal Assent in April 2010 and commenced on 1 October 2010. The general duty came into force on 5 April 2011 (GEO, Public Sector Equality Duty: Guidance for public authorities, 18 December 2023, link).

• Instead of focusing solely on their core responsibilities, public bodies are increasingly devoting time and resources to equality impact assessments, compliance exercises and litigation risk. Schools should focus on educating children, police should focus on catching criminals, and hospitals should focus on making people better. The next Conservative Government will ensure public institutions are focused on delivering results, not satisfying an ever-expanding compliance industry.

• The PSED has become a broad and uncertain duty that exposes almost every significant public decision to legal challenge. This encourages risk-averse, bureaucratic decision-making focused on compliance rather than outcomes, shifting power away from elected representatives and towards judges, regulators and officials.

Our plan:

• We will amend the Equality Act to repeal the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED) because it distracts public bodies from executing their core functions and enables activists to push radical political agendas.

• We will end costly equality bureaucracy, remove unnecessary compliance requirements and restore focus to frontline public services. Decisions about public policy should be made by elected representatives and public servants delivering results, not driven by activist litigation, regulatory pressure or procedural box-ticking.

• We will identify other areas where equality under the law is not being adhered to and tackle conduct and policy that undermines it. Our Culture and Integration Commission will keep looking at these issues.