Examples
Services include the provision of day care, the running of residential care homes and leisure centre facilities, whether provided by a private body or a local authority.
Public functions not involving the provision of a service include licensing functions; Government and local authority public consultation exercises; the provision of public highways; planning permission decisions; and core functions of the prison service and the probation service.
The definition of refusing to provide a service covers, for example, a bank which has a policy not to accept calls from customers through a third party. This could amount to indirect discrimination against a deaf person who uses a registered interpreter to call the bank.
An employer arranges for an insurer to provide a group health insurance scheme to his employees. The insurer refuses to provide cover on the same terms to one of the employees because she is transsexual. This would be treated as direct discrimination in the provision of services by the insurer against the employee in the same way as if the insurance was available to the general public. However, if it was the employer, rather than the insurer, who decided that the transsexual employee should not be able to access the group health insurance scheme, such discrimination in the employee’s access to benefits in the workplace would be covered by the provisions of Part 5 (work).
