Top Tweets for #MikeDrop

A magnificent letter from a magnificent woman. “ Dear Mr Wright, It must be terribly difficult having to share your name with the legendary and enormously popular disk jockey. My late husband, Sir Michael Caine, was not the actor, Nonetheless, Hollywood starlets might call saying they were in town. Awkward all around. I am a law maker. You would not expect me to pontificate on structural instability, hazardous materials or airborne toxins. I know nothing about accelerants, burn patterns or smoke staining. If I told the people, you represent how to deal with a fire I ought, rightly, be ignored. What the blazes, then, do you think you are doing when trying to meddle with the adoption of the EHRC's latest Service Code? If no one else has told you already I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but you appear to have no idea what you are talking about. Did you think to run your nonsense past a lawyer? (If you did,hesitate to pay.) The provision of changing and lavatorial facilities by an employer is governed by the Workplace (Health and Safety) Regulations 1992. Employers are required to provide separate facilities for males and females. There is no option to provide only mixed facilities. Mixed facilities are optional but sex-separated facilities are compulsory. That has been the case for 34 years. It has not changed because of a Supreme Court Judgment. You might not have understood it before, but you do not need EHRC Guidance to understand it now. Fire fighters must be provided with biologically separated sanitary and changing facilities. That will remain the case even if the EHRC Guidance is frustrated. No "hard-won" rights have been rolled back. The rights you imagine (or, more likely, have been briefed about) have never existed. Rights do not accrue and acquire validity thanks to magical thinking or bad advice. That which you frame as a call for employers and service providers to "go beyond minimum requirements" is, in fact, a demand that they break the law. I assume you had no idea that was the case. I can imagine you being keen to change laws with which you disagree, democratically, but I should be surprised were you to knowingly call for outright anarchy. The laws governing access to legitimately sex-separated facilities have not changed for employers since 1992, and for service providers since 2010. If you were ignorant of them before you have no excuse now. If you do not like them you may seek, democratically, to change them. Until then, I strongly encourage you to urge members to obey the law and stop posturing as though the law is something you might like it to be but is not. Yours sincerely Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne London SW1A OPW”