Government To Confirm Hospitals, Schools, Shops & Offices Must Have Separate Single-Sex Toilets

Kemi Badenoch, Equalities Minister, is now leading proposals to prevent non-residential buildings from being built with universal toilets to halt the forced sharing of spaces. It will include changes to building and planning regulations to enshrine separate stalls in new buildings and demand partitions be installed in current unisex facilities. 

This emerged as Ms. Kemi had warned that pupils avoid toilets during school hours because they only have access to gender-neutral lavatories. 

The plans understood to have silently been approved last month will see new offices, schools, hospitals, and shops having separate single-s*x. The Telegraph reported that Ms. Kemi claimed it’s legal and vital to providing single s*x spaces for males and females after claims in 2021 that women are finding it hard to find single s*x facilities.

In April, parents reportedly were angered after a £7 million children’s play area in Brentwood, Essex, was fitted with gender-neutral toilets. 

The National Trust had also been accused of pursuing a ‘woke’ agenda after introducing gender-neutral toilets at Tredegar House in Newport, South Wales, when a woman walked in to find a man urinating without the door locked. But then, the plans are understood as likely to be tabled as a common-sense way of putting a halt to an increasing norm of gender-neutral toilets being constructed as the default option in new buildings. 

Just last week, new guidance told civil servants they should let people who identify as transgender use whichever single-s*x toilet they want. 

However, Ms. Kemi’s proposals come after former communities secretary Robert Jenrick set out plans to rewrite planning regulations in favor of single-s*x facilities in 2021. A review of the issue was launched in November after several complaints about how companies and authorities had replaced single s*x restrooms with gender-neutral facilities.  

It was understood the change would apply to offices, shops, entertainment venues, and hospitals.

It was set to apply to other public services and buildings undergoing refurbishment, where consent is required for the works. And Under the changes, buildings will have to separate male and female facilities and ensure women’s cubicles are entirely self-contained, with basins and hand dryers, for privacy. But Women’s rights groups have long argued that they are disadvantaged by gender-neutral toilets containing urinals and cubicles.

So far, NHS hospitals have spent more than £800,000 on gender-neutral toilets in the past four years. 

Accordingly, data from the Taxpayers’ Alliance (TPA) showed nearly 740 new unisex toilets had been built or converted since 2018, including during the Covid pandemic. Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust, in Merseyside, alone spent more than £586,000 on 63 gender-neutral lavatories, and at the moment, the Home Office, BBC Channel 4 offices all have gender-neutral facilities.