Caste in Britain: Socio-Legal Review

Meena Dhanda was the Principle Investigator of the consortium of experts which produced the report.Background and aims of the project In April 2013, the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act was enacted. Section 97 of the Act requires government to introduce a statutory prohibition of caste discrimination into British equality law by making caste ‘an aspect of’ the protected characteristic of race in the Equality Act 2010. In light of this, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) contracted a team of academics drawn from different research institutions to conduct an independent study in two parts: • a review of existing socio-legal research on British equality law and caste; and • two supporting events (for experts and stakeholders). This report (Dhanda et al, 2014a) details the findings from the first part of the study and is best read alongside the report of the experts’ seminar and stakeholders’ workshop (Dhanda et al, 2014b)