Pothecary Witham Weld Solicitors

We allow married couples to hold wedding receptions and anniversary parties in our church hall. We have been asked if the premises can be used by a couple for a reception after their civil partnership ceremony. Our religious ethos does not accept homosexual relationships. Can we refuse the booking? Do you have views on how to deal with the possible exclusion of some religious charities from local authority contracts, where their ethos on civil partnerships is inconsistent with anti discrimination laws?”

Answer

There was quite a debate amongst religious leaders in many faiths over what are known as the Sexual Orientation Regulations 2007 – before they were recently introduced – and to an extent the lobbying worked because an exception for religious organisations was made (in Reg 14).

The exception is drawn in a rather complicated manner, but can be summarised as follows:-

If it is necessary to discriminate on grounds of sexual orientation either:

• to comply with the doctrine of the organisation or
• to avoid conflicting with the strongly held religious convictions of a significant number of the religion’s followers,

then the organisation can do so. Thus if these conditions apply, the church could say no to the hiring request.

Applying this to real situations will not be easy and cases will in due course arise on it. The claim is for breach of statutory duty with the damages based (it is thought) on “injury to feelings”. One could be looking at £500 - £5K for one-off cases and may be up to £15K for ongoing cases.

Then there’s the wider question raised of faith based charities being paid to provide services for Local Authorities and Social Services.

For many years charities in receipt of local authority funding have had to set out in their applications for grants their policies on equality and diversity, and sometimes to affirm their adherence to such policies in the contractual documents – not a problem by and large on race, disability, gender, religion or age discrimination – but often sexual orientation is now included.

The Sexual Orientation Regulations (at Reg 18) allow for discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation in the supply of “benefits” if to do so would be contrary to a charity’s constitution. “Benefits” is not defined and in not referred to in the clause relating to goods, facilities and services. So the extent of this exception is unclear. It is improbable that charities would wish now to change their constitutions to take advantage of the clause.

There is no answer for charities who have strong convictions on this. We have come across a local authority allowing the clause indicating adherence to a full equality policy to be qualified to the effect that compliance could be refused where difficulty or embarrassment would be caused to the charity concerned, but do not believe this is widespread – which accords with the spirit of the exception. It is certainly worth raising concerns when agreeing the form of contracts and establishing what would happen if some qualification of the requirement were to be sought – if this is thought to be of sufficient practical importance.

The only comfort is that it does not seem to be a problem in practice very often. Ultimately of course a charity might be put into a position of having to decide the least bad course – either to stop taking the Local Authority funding and possibly have to curtail or terminate their work, or continuing their work with their principles compromised.