Can Equality Act protections be replaced with common sense, as Kemi Badenoch suggests?

The Tory leader says the public sector duty to consider minorities encourages division but legal experts warn abolishing it will fuel discrimination

For more than two decades, an important part of Britain’s equality laws ensured public institutions had to think about the impact the decisions they make could have on different groups within society.

Introduced in the wake of the Stephen Lawrence inquiry, the public sector equality duty required public bodies – such as local councils, police forces and hospitals – to think proactively about equality law. Now this once uncontroversial public duty is a new battleground in Britain’s culture wars.