When a UK golf or members’ club can lawfully turn you away
Key Points
- A UK club counts as an association if it has 25 or more members, membership rules and a selection process.
- Gyms, nightclubs and fee-only supporters' clubs are service providers, not associations.
- Clubs other than political parties can restrict membership by protected characteristic, but never by colour.
- Restricting on one characteristic does not permit discrimination on any other.
- Clubs must not discriminate against, harass or victimise guests, and must make reasonable adjustments in advance.
Britain’s new statutory equality Code allows private clubs of any size to restrict membership to people sharing a protected characteristic, with one exception the Act never permits: colour.
A body only counts as an association under the Equality Act if it has at least 25 members, regulates admission through its rules, and runs a selection process.
The Code’s example is a squash club of 35 members that asks applicants to play two existing members who then certify their standard.
Written rules are not essential, provided everyone involved in selection knows them and applies them consistently.
Golf clubs, working men’s clubs, ex-service clubs, gardening and fishing clubs, political parties, the Scouts and the Guides, Rotary clubs and Masonic Grand Lodges all fall within the definition.
A gym or nightclub that simply charges a fee is not an association, whatever it calls its customers, and the rules for service providers apply to it instead.
The same goes for a supporters’ club or campaigning body open to anyone who pays, and for an informal book club or walking group.
One organisation can wear several hats at once: the Code’s golf club example is simultaneously an association to its members, a service provider when it opens its course, café and shop to the public, an employer to its staff, and a manager of premises if it lets any out.
Who a club can exclude
Associations other than political parties can confine membership to people who share a protected characteristic.
The Code’s illustrations include a club requiring national origins in Africa or the Caribbean, which stays lawful because the restriction rests on national origins rather than colour, and a women-only association lawfully refusing an application from a trans woman, because under the Act she does not share that characteristic.
A club that restricts membership this way can also limit associates and guests to people sharing the same characteristic.
Registered political parties can never restrict membership by protected characteristic, so a party cannot admit only Scottish people or only Christians.
Restricting on one characteristic gives no licence to discriminate on another. The Code states that a Christian association must not refuse Christian Irish Travellers as members.
Clubs also owe duties to guests, whom they must not discriminate against, harass or victimise.
Its examples include door staff telling a woman guest she cannot enter the snooker room, bar staff serving a Polish guest after British ones while making derogatory remarks about foreign workers, and a club excluding a guest and the disabled child she cares for from the main dining room.
Clubs carry the same anticipatory duty to make reasonable adjustments as service providers do, covering access to benefits and facilities, members keeping their rights, and admission to membership or invitation as a guest.
Victimisation covers retaliation for a complaint. The Code describes a woman refused entry to a club dinner the following year after complaining that her rejected membership application was sex discrimination.
