Following on from my previous item on the Equality website, I was interested to see this item in the Times Law section today on John Wadham who is heading up the new Equality and Human Rights Commission.
This article makes the point that the new commission not only covers areas of law formerly dealt with by three separate commissions, it also has a budget to enforce the Human Rights Act. It will be really interesting to see how that works out.
How will it affect housing law? The main area that I can see at present is defending possession claims where the defendant is being evicted for some reason connected with their disability. It will be interesting to see if this will be largely confined to the social landlords or whether it will extend to the private sector (something discussed by myself and Nearly Legal in my previous post on the Malcolm case).
Can anyone see any other potential areas of conflict?
No related posts.
I suspect that individual discrimination claims/defences, not necessarily just disability based, are probably likely to continue to be more of an issue than Human Rights in our field, with some very very limited exceptions.