My honourable friend the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Government Equalities Office (Michael Jabez Foster) has made the following Statement.

The Equality Bill, currently before the House of Lords, will introduce a new integrated equality duty, which will bring together the existing race, disability and gender equality duties and extend them to cover age, sexual orientation, religion or belief and gender reassignment in full. The equality duty will follow the same structure as the current duties and will be underpinned by a number of specific duties, to be set out in secondary legislation, which will help public authorities in the better performance of the duty.

On 11 June 2009, the Government published a consultation document entitled Equality Bill: Making It Work—Policy Proposals for Specific Duties, setting out policy proposals for the new specific duties. The consultation finished on 30 September and today we have published a policy statement in response to the consultation entitled Equality Bill: Making It Work—Policy Proposals for Specific Duties. A Policy Statement, summarising the responses and setting out our further thinking for the specific duties.

We are placing copies of the policy statement in the Libraries of the House. Copies will also be available on the Government Equalities Office website www. equalities.gov.uk.

We will consult further on the draft regulations for specific duties following Royal Assent to the Equality Bill.