Judgment Approved by the court for handing down. R (Bridges) -v- CC South Wales & ors and enforceable legal obligation which placed race equality at the heart of the public authority’s decision making. The new duty was intended to mark a major change in the law. It represented a move from a fault-based scheme where legal liability rested only with those who could be shown to have committed one or other of the unlawful acts. Instead, the dutybearer, the public authority, was to be required to proactively consider altering its practices and structures to meet this statutory duty. This was considered important in light of the findings of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry.” (Emphasis added) 179. Public concern about the relationship between the police and BAME communities has not diminished in the years since the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry Report. The reason why the PSED is so important is that it requires a public authority to give thought to the potential impact of a new policy which may appear to it to be neutral but which may turn out in fact to have a disproportionate impact on certain sections of the population. 180. The importance of the PSED was emphasised in R (Elias) v Secretary of State for Defence [2006] EWCA Civ 1293, [2006] 1 WLR 3213, at [274], where Arden LJ (as she then was) said: “It is the clear purpose of section 71 [the predecessor to section 149] to require public bodies … to give advance consideration to issues of race discrimination before making any policy decision that may be affected by them. This is a salutary requirement, and this provision must be seen as an integral and important part of the mechanisms for ensuring the fulfilment of the aims of anti-discrimination legislation. …” 181. We acknowledge that what is required by the PSED is dependent on the context and does not require the impossible. It requires the taking of reasonable steps to make enquiries about what may not yet be known to a public authority about the potential impact of a proposed decision or policy on people with the relevant characteristics, in particular for present purposes race and sex. 182. We also acknowledge that, as the Divisional Court found, there was no evidence before it that there is any reason to think that the particular AFR technology used in this case did have any bias on racial or gender grounds. That, however, it seems to us, was to put the cart before the horse. The whole purpose of the positive duty (as opposed to the negative duties in the Equality Act 2010) is to ensure that a public authority does not inadvertently overlook information which it should take into account. 183. Against that background of principle we turn to examine the reasons given by the Divisional Court for rejecting this ground of challenge. There are two aspects of the present case which particularly impressed the Divisional Court. 184. The first was the fact that there is a “human failsafe” component in the way in which AFR Locate is used. This means that a positive match made by the automated system will never by itself lead to human intervention. Before such an intervention (for example a stop of a member of the public for a conversation with a police officer) can