Equality Bill

This clause is not confined to employment. I have some experience of this in handling student complaints. In my time, discrimination against students who had dyslexia was a major issue. Dyslexia is not visible, and universities, quite reasonably, could not be expected to make allowances in relation to time and marks if they did not know that a student had dyslexia. In the written decisions that the Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education gave, and based on counsel’s opinion, we would say that the university had not acted unreasonably if it could not have known that the student had the disability of dyslexia. That seems to be a perfectly reasonable outcome. I therefore support the noble Lord, Lord Lester, in not wishing to place too heavy a burden on employers and others, such as universities, who cannot be expected to know every detail about employees and students. Indeed I believe that we should encourage employees and students not to be ashamed of having a disability and to come forward so that the organisation can cater for it, rather than waiting until something has gone wrong and then saying that they have been discriminated against. I think that this is a good subsection.