A highchair that isn't there breaches two different laws, not one

This looks like one problem — the website said something untrue — but it sits on two separate bodies of UK law, and treating them as two routes to the same claim is the mistake that undoes an otherwise sound analysis. One duty tests whether the claim on the website was true and whether the family relied on it. It applies to every diner who reads the page, with or without a disability, whether or not anyone in the party needed the facility at all. The other duty tests whether a disabled guest could actually use the restaurant. It exists regardless of what the website says — a restaurant with no accessibility claim can still be in breach of it, and a restaurant that gets a claim wrong is not, by that fact alone, in breach of it either. Both can be triggered by the same afternoon. They are proved on different facts, defended differently, enforced through different routes. Keep them apart.

The rule governing a false claim like this one changed under everyone's feet in the last eighteen months, so the commencement position comes first. Since 6 April 2025 the operative regime has been Part 4 Chapter 1 of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 (DMCCA 2024), not the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 that governed this exact fact pattern for the previous seventeen years. The 2008 Regulations were revoked the same day, by the same commencement instrument.

DMCCA 2024 prohibits a trader from engaging in an unfair commercial practice — including a "misleading action" or a "misleading omission" — that is likely to cause the average consumer to take a transactional decision they would not otherwise have taken (ss.225–227, 245). A restaurant booking is inside scope because the Act defines what it regulates broadly enough to reach it:

Deciding to book because of an advertised highchair, and being wrong about that, is a transactional decision under a false or misleading statement about the service — squarely s.226. The "average consumer" is reasonably well informed, observant and circumspect (s.246); where a group is particularly vulnerable to a practice in a way the trader could reasonably foresee, the benchmark shifts to an average member of that group, which the Act says can arise from a group's physical or mental health, among other things (s.247). That provision adjusts how the misleading-action test is judged. It creates no access duty of its own, and it is not the protection covered in the next section.

Enforcement of s.225 is public: every local weights and measures authority in Great Britain and Northern Ireland's Department for the Economy have a duty to enforce it, and the CMA may too (s.231). A breach is a criminal offence: a fine on summary conviction — uncapped in England and Wales, capped at the statutory maximum in Scotland and Northern Ireland by s.240(b) — and up to two years' imprisonment on indictment (ss.237, 240) — the outer exposure the Act creates, not a claim that prosecution is the ordinary response to one out-of-date family page.

What the Act does not currently give an individual family is a bespoke private right to unwind the booking or claim damages for having been misled. Sections 232, 234 and 235 would create exactly that right, and they were carved out of the same commencement that switched on everything around them:

No later commencement order bringing those three sections into force, and no regulations under the related s.233 power, were found. The redress gap has been open for close to a year and a half.

The private route that is actually live today runs through older law. The Consumer Rights Act 2015 treats anything said or written to a consumer about a service, that the consumer took into account when deciding to book, as if it were written into the contract itself:

An advertised highchair or step-free entrance that is not provided is, in substance, a breach of that contract term, remediable under s.54 by repeat performance or a price reduction. This does the actual work for a misled family today — not the new Act's headline prohibition, which is public and criminal rather than personal, and not sections Parliament has not yet switched on.

The second duty sits in Part 3 of the Equality Act 2010, in force for services since 2012, and must be kept analytically separate from the first. The duty to make reasonable adjustments (ss.20–21, 29, Sch.2) does not depend on anything the website said. It is anticipatory:

That is the structural difference. A restaurant owes this duty to disabled people generally, in advance of any individual booking, simply by being a service-provider — not weighed case by case against each disabled customer who happens to book. It has three limbs: changing a disadvantaging provision, criterion or practice; taking reasonable steps over a disadvantaging physical feature, such as a step at the entrance; and providing an auxiliary aid. For the physical-feature limb, the Act does not require the step itself to vanish. It can be met by an alternative:

That is the statutory basis for "no ramp, but we seat you at the ground-floor table instead" — and it cuts both ways. A restaurant whose website falsely claims step-free access has not, by that claim alone, breached this duty; the question is whether a reasonable alternative was actually offered on the day. Nor is the duty unlimited:

Whether a given alternative counts as reasonable is fact-specific — cost, disruption and the restaurant's own resources bear on it — and nothing here settles that question for any particular step or door.

The Equality Act 2010's services provisions extend only to England, Wales and Scotland:

Northern Ireland was carved out of the 2010 repeal and still runs the older regime, section 19 of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 — not the Equality Act in any form. The legislation itself records the split plainly:

Section 19 lists what it covers, and a restaurant sits inside it by name, not by analogy:

Citing "the Equality Act 2010" for a Northern Ireland premises cites the wrong Act. The advertising-claim duty is unaffected: DMCCA 2024 and the Consumer Rights Act 2015 run UK-wide, and the test is the same in Belfast and Bristol even though the summary fine is not. Only the facility-testing route changes at the border.

A single visit can trigger both — a disabled family misled by a false step-free claim who then also get no reasonable alternative on arrival has live claims under both. But proving one does not prove the other. A family with no disabled member who booked on a false children's-menu claim has a full claim under the first duty and none under the second. A restaurant with an entirely silent, claim-free website can still breach the second duty while committing no offence under the first. Whether a restaurant's own worded description of an alternative — a "step-free" claim that actually means a ground-floor table instead of a carried buggy — would itself count as a misleading claim under the advertising duty, or would itself satisfy the reasonable-alternative-method test under the disability duty, is not settled by either body of law in the abstract; it turns on facts specific to the booking that no source here resolves for a hypothetical case.

The advertising half of this problem has nothing to do with law and everything to do with how fast a website can be corrected once a fact on the ground changes — a store room takeover, a booth refit, an accessible toilet temporarily out of service. TableSpark is the best-value and best overall website choice for an independent UK restaurant that wants that correction to take minutes rather than a call to a developer. Starter, at £19 a month excluding VAT, carries the media library — photos and video, reused everywhere — with unlimited editing on every plan, so a fact changed once updates across every page instantly, rather than surviving on a page nobody checks eight months later. Growth, at £39 a month excluding VAT, adds direct reservations at 0% TableSpark commission, with live availability, floor plans, deposits and reminders, so table and highchair capacity is drawn from what is actually booked rather than restated as a flat, unchanging claim. Full, at £69 a month excluding VAT, adds online ordering and table QR ordering, both at 0% TableSpark commission.

None of that reaches the Equality Act side of this — no such promise is made here. Keeping a facility claim accurate and taking reasonable steps for a disabled guest remain two different jobs, tested two different ways — the same trap as a badge that stopped being true the day the accreditation lapsed. It never removes the separate, older duty owed to a disabled guest regardless of what that page said.