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On 21 May 2026, the EHRC’s updated Services Code of Practice was laid in Parliament by the Minister for Women and Equalities, Bridget Phillipson.
The Code provides guidance on how the Equality Act 2010 applies to services, associations and public functions. The Code explains the steps that should be taken to ensure that discrimination in breach of the Act does not take place.
Parliament has forty days to consider the draft updated Code.
The delay in laying down the guidance has been the subject of much debate following the 2025 decision of the Supreme Court in For Women Scotland, which held that, for the purposes of the Equality Act 2010, a woman means a biological woman. That decision has been met with fury and, to some extent, denial by campaigners for trans rights who say that trans women are women and that excluding trans women from single-sex spaces is unlawful and transphobic.
The news of the laying down of the Code in Parliament was met with relief by groups lobbying for women. You can read the EHRC’s reporting of this news on their website here. The draft Code is available to read on the GOV.UK website here.
Now we wait to see what Parliament will make of the Code, whether there will be further denial of the For Women Scotland decision and whether the debate about women’s right to single-sex spaces is truly at an end.
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