Following a consultation progress, the government has decided that specific legal protection against caste-based discrimination is not required.
It says that it has not been able to identify a legally workable definition of caste and that it would be difficult to differentiate between caste and social class. The government believes that this could lead to the unintentional introduction of legal protection from discrimination based on social class, which is certainly not on the government’s agenda.
The government also says that the very low number of claims to date alleging caste-based discrimination show that specific protection is not required. The logic of this conclusion is highly questionable: there may have been similarly low numbers of cases alleging religious or sexual orientation discrimination before the law was changed to outlaw discrimination on those bases.
In any event, the government concluded that case law, such as the Employment Appeal Tribunal’s decision Chandhok v Tirkey which we blogged about in 2015 as the UK’s first caste discrimination case shows that, in most foreseeable cases, individuals will be able to bring claims on the basis of their ethnic origins, which form part of the definition of race for the purpose of protection against discrimination.
It is important to note that ethnic origin, national origin, physical appearance and nationality are all part of the definition of race in the Equality Act 2010 and they are not interchangeable. Describing the protected characteristic accurately therefore has a crucial impact on the outcome of race discrimination claims.