© 2011 A B Academic Publishers. Printed in Great Britain THE EXPANDED PUBLIC SECTOR DUTY: AGE, RELIGION AND SEXUAL ORIENTATION

The Equality Act 2010 is largely a consolidating statute, bringing together a raft of equality measures enacted over the last 40 years. Along side this consolidation, the Act also introduces some new measures, including the creation of new public sector equality duties to cover reli-gion and belief, age, sexual orientation and maternity and pregnancy. Similar duties were already in place generally in the public sector with regard to race, gender and disability, 1 and with respect to other grounds for Greater London, as discussed in Lulham's contribution to this volume. The expansion of the public sector duties are best viewed as an attempt to harmonise or 'level up ' the protection available to the newer equality grounds in the consolidating 2010 Act. However, as will be illus-trated below, this extension of the equality duty to new grounds may be somewhat problematic, and may illustrate some of the underlying tensions in current equality law. OVERVIEW OF THE NEW EQUALITY DUT