The EHRC Code of Practice on Services, Public Functions and Associations came into force on 5 August 2026, brought in by SI 2026/788 and replacing the 2011 Code revoked the same day. It imposes no legal obligations of its own, but courts and tribunals must consider any part of it that appears relevant to a question in proceedings, which makes it evidence in a discrimination claim rather than a rule book.
What is the legal status of the EHRC Code?
The distinction that matters most is the one much of the general coverage has skipped. A statutory code issued under the Equality Act 2006 does not create duties, and a service provider does not breach the Code as such. The EHRC’s own position is that the Code “does not impose legal obligations” and is not an authoritative statement of the law, since only courts and tribunals can supply that. What it supplies instead is the standard against which conduct gets measured, because any relevant provision must be taken into account where it bears on a question in the proceedings.
For advisers that has a practical consequence worth being clear about with clients. A client asking whether it is now required to do something is asking a question the Code cannot answer. The useful question is what a tribunal would make of the client’s position when it is held up against the Code, and whether the reasoning behind that position exists anywhere a tribunal could look at it.
The Code was laid before Parliament on 21 May 2026 and completed its 40-day scrutiny period on 9 July, after which the EHRC issued it on 14 July. It extends to England, Wales and Scotland, and covers discrimination, harassment and victimisation in services and public functions under Part 3 of the Equality Act 2010.
What the Code says about single-sex services
The Code states that separately provided facilities for men and women should operate on a biological sex basis. It also says that requiring a trans person to use facilities matching their biological sex may amount to discrimination in some circumstances, and it presents gender-neutral provision as an option available to providers.
Those two propositions sit alongside each other in the document rather than as alternatives to pick between, and that is what makes the drafting difficult to apply. Neither a blanket policy nor an improvised one is obviously safe, because the Code contemplates that the answer may differ according to the service, the facility and the circumstances. The analysis is pushed back onto the Equality Act’s own machinery, where the separate and single-sex service provisions and the requirement that any less favourable treatment be a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim do the actual work. The Code is a guide to how those provisions are read, and it does not stand in for them.
It is also worth telling clients that the revision is broader than the part attracting attention. The EHRC updated the Code to reflect more than a decade of legislative and case law development, including the legalisation of same-sex marriage and case law on the definition of disability, and it follows the Supreme Court’s decision in For Women Scotland Ltd v Scottish Ministers [2025] UKSC 16 that sex in the Equality Act 2010 means biological sex. A client that reads only the single-sex chapters will miss changes that affect it.
Why does the Code not apply to employers?
Because it is a different code. This one covers services, public functions and associations. Workplace facilities sit under the Employment Statutory Code of Practice, which has not been updated and for which no timetable has been published, and the EHRC has indicated it is considering interim workplace guidance rather than a full rewrite.
For employment teams that gap is the practical story of the week. A client that both provides services to the public and employs staff is now working from a revised code on one side of its premises and an unrevised one on the other. Advice on workplace facilities still rests on the Act itself, the 2011 employment code and For Women Scotland, without the interpretive layer the services side has just acquired. That is an argument for care rather than for delay, because an employer facing the question this month will not get an answer by waiting for guidance that has no publication date attached to it.
Is the Code settled?
Not entirely. A legal challenge has been signalled with support from the Good Law Project, and 167 MPs tabled an early day motion for the Code to be disapproved. Neither affected commencement, and the Commencement Order brought the Code into force on 5 August as laid.
The significance of a live challenge is narrower than it looks from the outside. Unless and until a court says otherwise the Code is in force and tribunals must take it into account, so no adviser can sensibly tell a client to sit the position out. What the challenge does change is the value of a documented decision trail, since a client that recorded why it reached the position it did will be better placed under either outcome than one that adopted the Code and stopped there.
What should advisers do now?
Three things are worth doing before the position moves again.
Work out which clients are caught. Anything that provides a service, exercises a public function or runs an association falls within scope, which reaches a good deal further than the sectors the coverage has concentrated on and picks up commercial landlords, membership bodies, healthcare providers and much of the leisure industry.
Separate the services question from the employment one. They now run on different codes, and advice that treats them as a single problem will be wrong about one of them.
Record the reasoning rather than only the outcome. What a tribunal examines is whether the provider considered the question and reached a proportionate conclusion on the facts of its own service, and a policy with no reasoning behind it is harder to defend than a policy the client can explain. That holds whichever way the client decided. The full Code is published in English and Welsh, alongside an equality impact assessment, and clients likely to face the question should be reading the relevant chapters rather than the summaries.
Firms advising on both sides of this will already be tracking the wider employment reform timetable, and the interaction with the Employment Rights Act commencement dates matters for anyone rewriting policies this autumn. The same drafting discipline applies to the changes to non-disclosure agreements under section 202A, where the reasoning on file has become as important as the clause itself.
Any client that provides a service, runs a public function or operates an association is now being measured against this Code in any discrimination claim. It does not bind employers, and the Employment Code still has not been updated, so advice on workplace facilities rests on a different and less settled footing. A challenge is expected, which makes documenting the reasoning behind any policy change more important than the change itself.