Britain’s most senior woman judge gave warning last night that the Government’s proposed overhaul of equality laws would not close the pay or gender gap.

Baroness Hale of Richmond, who sits in the House of Lords, said that despite decades of anti-discrimimation law there was a long way to go to achieve equality.

For women in part-time work, the situation was worse and without quicker progress, the gender pay gap would not close until 2085.

People from ethnic minorities were a fifth less likely to find work than white people and it would take them almost 100 years to have the same job prospects as white people, she said.

Lady Hale went on to give warning of a likely “drastic” reduction in the success rate in discrimination claims which would make the situation worse.

In 2006-07, only six per cent of applicants won sex discrimination claims at a tribunal.

At the same time, ten per cent of race discrimination claims were successful and 17 per cent of disability claims.

But the success rate was set to be “drastically reduced this year,” she told the Employment Lawyers Association annual conference.

“This could be because there is very little discrimination in the work place; or because most of the meritorious claims are settled; but both these explanations seem to me to be a little unlikely,” she said.

In her view, however, the root cause was the basis of the equality laws, in which cases examined for comparison were usually held to be unalike and therefore there was no discrimination.

By contrast, under the Human Rights act there was a different approach: differences in treatment were only acceptable if they could be justified.

The proposed new Equality Bill did not show much sign of addressing the problems, she said. On the contrary it could make matters worse, making it more difficult for people to mount successful claims.

“What, for example, of the registrar whose religious beliefs obliged her to discriminate against same sex couples?”

The existing stucture was not well suited to working out how to balance conflicting interests such as those, she said.

She urged an overhaul of the laws to adopt a “human rights approach”, with a proper defence to discrimination that it was justified.

Tribunals might then be more willing to recognise that discrimination had taken place and move to examinining if there was good reason for it.

That should include the neeed to level to level the playing field or counter historic disadvantage, she said.

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