Those of us concerned about the fate of the Public Sector Equality Duty are starting to notice increased activity by interested parties. The Government has announced that the review will be published immediately after the summer recess. The review was carried out under the auspices of the Red Tape Challenge.
Announcing the Review last year Theresa May said:
Bureaucracy and prescription are not routes to equality. Over-burdening businesses benefits no one, and real change doesn’t come from telling people what to do. Today’s announcement strikes the right balance between protecting people from discrimination and letting businesses get on with the job.
It is not the Government’s intention to abolish the Equality Act. We are putting it in place, but we want to hear from businesses how we can do regulation better to ensure that they can improve their businesses and employ more people.
This claim has not inspired universal confidence. Professor Sir Bob Hepple QC has claimed that “…we are witnessing ‘death by a thousand cuts’ of the Equality Act 2010″.
Lib Dem Peers (and some MPs) are to be congratulated for their resistance to the attempt to undermine the General Equality Duty as set out in the Equality Act 2006 under the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act.
The next battle is looming. A couple of weeks ago the Oxford Human Rights Hub Blog noted: “An analysis of the evidence submitted by various groups and organisations to the Government’s call to assess the effectiveness of the PSED clearly shows that the duty is working.” The Local Government Association is planning a conference in November to discuss the impact of the recommendations.
It should be pointed out however that the purpose of the review was about “letting business get on with the job”, yet entering the search term ‘Public Sector Equality Duty Review” into the websites of the CBI, British Chamber of Commerce and IoD produced nothing of relevance to the Duty, probably because the duty is of no relevance to business. Perhaps that’s why none of them are calling a similar conference!
This is not however a reason to get complacent. Supporters of the duty need to be on guard to ensure that should the Review turn out to be more of the “1000 cuts”, the knives are blunted.
* Robin is a member in Cardiff and Vale of Glamorgan
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3 Comments
Why would the private sector be interested particularly in the Public Sector Equality Duty?
Good to keep our eyes on this, to ensure that the principle behind the Equalities Acts is maintained. Particular implementations of those principles will be as ripe for reform as anything else in law or in the public sector, so I’m not going to jump to conclusions whenever I hear “do regulation better”. But if there is anything of concern in the detail, do let us know.
The PSED is very important, especially if we’re going to keep the record on equalities. Stuff like campaigning against the return of Section 28 is much more simple if the public sector has an equality duty against homophobic discrimination.
I welcome this excellent article by Robin Lynn.
The Red Tape Challenge is a byword for a dogma-driven partisan assault on equalities legislation, presumably on grounds it was introduced by another party. It is just three months since the Government were forced into a u-turn over plans to scrap Section 3 of the Equality Act 2010 – essentially a mission statement to work towards the elimination of discrimination – which was a ‘duty’ that required not a single piece of paper or a solitary tick-box but instead is a message to public sector leaders to treat equality as a political priority. Yet just three months later the same Government are to receive the report of a taskforce reviewing the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED) which is due to recommend, at the very least, the watering down of PSED. Hardly a surprise as the taskforce is Tory-dominated and chaired by a former Tory MP. Yet from what I hear the taskforce has been starkly split on the issue with some members wanting to protect the duty.
If ministers seek to water down or abolish PSED it would be yet another attempt to dismantle a equalities framework that was constructed piece-by-piece over four decades, as a result of long-running struggles by generations past. Both Section 3 (the ‘general duty’) and PSED have their roots in the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000 that was the result of the Macpherson report into the death of Stephen Lawrence. In this year, the 20th anniversary of Stephen Lawrence’s death, do we as Liberal Democrats really want to collude with Tories to dismantle the last piece of Stephen’s legacy?
Theresa May is right that she does not intend to abolish the whole Equality Act, rather the government is engaged in hacking lumps out of it. It has echoes of the decision of government not to abolish the Commission for Equality and Human Rights but instead metaphorically move it from a flat to a bedsit and move it from work to benefits. By cutting funding by over 70% and disabling its’ powers the CEHR is being almost abolished by stealth, hollowed-out, neutered and chained down. The lights are on but there’s virtually no-one at home to uphold and defend equalities laws, which is what the organisation is there to do.
PSED is a tool with great potential to advance equalities across the board, the only problem with it is that it has not been promoted and rolled-out. Far from being a red-tape burden, most of Britain’s 40,000 public authorities are not using it at all. The obvious thing to do with PSED is to use it, monitor whether it is effective or to what extent it is a ‘burden’ and amend its’ use accordingly. But the fact is that we have not nearly reached a position to brand it a burden.
In fact the whole concept of equalities being ‘a burden’ is uniquely Tory belief that sadly a few Lib Dems – mostly those in power – have brought into. To buy into it they have jettisoned our own party’s values in equality as enshrined in the preamble to our constitution.
The very idea underpinning the Equality Act 2010 was to simplify previous equalities legislation. The Government only started reviewing PSED after the Education Secretary was found to have failed to consider the duty in scrapping the Building schools for the Future programme. In other words, an example of how PSED has drawn to ministers attention why they must consider the equalities impact of their decisions has become the potential death-knell of this duty. This is not about red tape but red faces.
In last year Doreen Lawrence wrote to Nick Clegg about the PSED review and he wrote back reassuring her that race equality was still a priority for the coalition. He said: “We recognise how important it is to ensure the legacy of Stephen’s murder and Lord Macpherson’s report will never be lost. That legacy was to change fundamentally and forever the way we think about race in this country. We know you have worked tirelessly to drive these improvements and are extremely grateful to you for your work. We also want to reiterate the government’s commitment to equal treatment and equal opportunity. We care a great deal about making sure our policies never marginalise or discriminate.”
As both Clegg and Jo Swinson are on record as supporting PSED I sincerely hope they stand up against Tory dogma which seeks to strip away the equalities framework that is the reason why British politicians can say we have better equalities laws than most of the rest of the world.