Speech by Trevor Phillips, Chair, at the Local Government Chronicle's conference on the Equalities Review 

 

Thank you, Chair. I should begin by saying how pleased I am not only to be invited to speak at this conference, but at the very fact that this conference is being held at all. It’s good to see so many people here to engage with the challenges of developing a comprehensive and sustainable equalities framework – and more importantly, I hope, with the challenge of delivering equality.

I’m here now, bright and early at twenty to ten, to kick the day’s proceedings off. And you’ve asked me to do that, I guess, because I’ve kicked them off already, by chairing the Equalities Review which we’re all here to discuss. So I should start by talking a little about that process, about what the Review is and what it isn’t, about what I believe the next steps will be, and about what delivering greater equality means for you as planners, commissioners and providers of services across local government.

The Equalities Review was set up in 2005 to be a root and branch investigation into the causes of persistent inequality and discrimination in British society. I was asked to chair it by the man we are all still learning to call “the former Prime Minister”, but it’s important to be clear that it took place independently of Government. It was commissioned with a view to feeding into future Government policy, but it is not itself a statement of Government policy. If you want Government policy, you need to read the Discrimination Law Review, which came out last month – and if you do that, you’ll notice the difference. I’ll come to that later.

The independence of the Equalities Review was perhaps a double-edged sword. On the one hand, our independence enabled us to speak more frankly about continuing inequality and discrimination, and to make more far-reaching and robust recommendations about tackling it, than we would have been able to do if everything we said had had to be signed off by a Government minister. But on the other hand, our independence meant that nothing we recommended can be understood as a commitment. The Government is not formally bound by anything the Equalities Review says. But I believe that it is – that we all are – morally bound by its findings. They show, in brief, three things.

The first is the scale of the challenge that faces us. Some equality gaps are simply not closing. Some groups are falling behind even in primary schools. Women, disabled people and most ethnic minority groups are still not getting a fair deal at work. Some groups are disproportionately penalised by the criminal justice system. Inequalities experienced over a lifetime are reinforced in old age.

The second thing is that inequality is changing as the world changes. Changes in the labour market will mean greater demands for skills, and therefore a danger of shutting out people who are currently underskilled. Changes in migration will create new patterns of interaction as well as new frictions and new areas of disadvantage. An ageing population, and an increase in the number of disabled people, will put increased pressure on health and social care budgets, as well as on families who will take on caring responsibilities for longer. These changes need new kinds of responses – we can’t simply assume that the measures we’ve taken to tackle inequality in the past will work in the future.

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The third thing we showed is the prize that lies before us. Tackling inequality is not just a matter of justice – although it certainly is a matter of justice. It is also in all our interests. It can bring real benefits, to the economy and to society as a whole. Economically, inequality is expensive because when young people miss out on educational opportunities from which they could benefit, they miss out on the ability to play the fullest possible role in our skills-based economy. When disabled people are denied employment opportunities, they cost the economy three times over: in lost productivity, in lost tax revenue and in the cost of the benefits they are paid instead. Removing barriers to women’s participation in the labour market would be worth between £15 billion and £23 billion. Socially, inequality is expensive because unequal societies are less secure, more violent, less pleasant places to live. So a more equal society delivers stability and prosperity, increases our well-being, and enhances disadvantaged people’s life chances and achievements without constraining those of other people.

Well, that’s what we said. But as I say, the Equalities Review was our thinking, not the Government’s. The Government’s latest thoughts on the subject were set out about a month ago, in the Discrimination Law Review Green Paper, which will eventually lead to a Single Equality Act. Frankly, as a first shot at tackling persistent inequality, the Review is a pretty poor piece of range-finding. It’s not wrong to make sure that women get a place at the bar at the local golf club – but I might venture to suggest that that isn’t the most pressing inequality facing Britain today, and the fact that it was the main news headline about the Green Paper when it was published tells us something about where the Government is and where it needs to get to. In the end, education and employment have a more significant and lasting effect on life chances than the ability to play golf.

I think it would be wrong, though, to assume that the Green Paper reflects the Government’s fixed final view on the matter. First of all, you may have noticed a number of interesting, and not entirely unexpected, political developments since its publication – we can’t simply disregard the impact on policy of having a new Prime Minister, and a new ministerial team. It’s very interesting that responsibility for this policy area has transferred out of the Department for Communities and Local Government; it’s not settled where it will go: either because everyone wants it, or because no one does. Either way, it’s clear that ministers recognise how politically potent this agenda has become. Secondly, the Green Paper is a consultation document, so there’s scope for plenty of change to be made to it over the weeks and months ahead. If I can make a prediction, it’s this: the Single Equality Act will not look like the Discrimination Law Review.

Indeed, I think that there’s a good chance that when we do finally see a Bill, and once that Bill has gone through parliament, we’ll end up with legislation which looks much more like the Equalities Review than the Green Paper does at the moment – a Bill which can deliver real equality.

My interest in that isn’t just because of my work on the Equalities Review. As you know, I’m also the Chair of the Commission for Equality and Human Rights, which formally comes into existence in October. The CEHR will be the main body charged with enforcing the new Act, so we want it to be as good as possible. And our name is important. We’re not just about equality; we’re also about human rights. I believe that the human rights framework can provide substance to a deeper, more fruitful concept of equality. Human rights flesh out a positive notion of equality that includes security, dignity, freedom of expression, rights to participation and due process. They help us to develop an understanding of equality that is more about what we are capable of and less about what traditionally has held us back.

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It is this richer definition of equality which underlies the Scorecard measures put forward by the Equalities Review. Someone said to me after we published our report, “It’s all rather technical, isn’t it?” Well, actually, yes it is, and that’s good. Because I think that one of the things we need to do is to get past the slogans and focus on how we actually change things, including in government. What is the effect of the first Equalities PSA? What should its structure be? How do we deal with measurement? How do we focus on getting public authorities, local government, central government to change things? At the heart of that is a measurement framework we propose in the Equalities Review, because in the end, it’s hard to persuade people that change is necessary, especially in government, unless we set things out in numbers. And I hope that our scorecard will form part of the new and entirely original Equality Public Service Agreement being consulted upon by the Treasury as part of the Comprehensive Spending Review.

If the Treasury does what I hope it will do, and if the Single Equality Act does what I hope it will do, and if we at the Commission for Equality and Human Rights do our job well, this will be a massive step forward for Britain. Legally, equality has been viewed as a coin of two sides, with the 'advantaged' on one side, and the 'disadvantaged' on the other - men and women, white and ethnic minority, non-disabled and disabled, for example. The legal expression has been the requirement for real-life comparators. And progress towards equality has been measured by how much supposedly 'disadvantaged' individuals are able to behave and be treated like a traditionally 'advantaged' comparator.

A human rights framework could transform our account of equality by taking us beyond narrow comparators and discrimination grounds to a new definition of equality that is based on fairness and freedom. In this light, whether or not we are equal can be measured firstly, by whether we have what we need to lead a successful, flourishing life and secondly, by our ability to be authentically ourselves - true to ourselves - regardless of how we may differ from others.

In thinking about what this might mean to you as you deliver local services, I want to come back to the Equalities Review again and mention a fourth thing we found, which I think has big implications for the way we articulate the case for equality. When we talked about the definition of equality in the course of producing the Review, we found that the concept is often muddled or misunderstood. British people strongly agree that it is wrong for people to face undue penalties in employment, health or other life chances. More than four out of five Britons think that everyone being treated equally is important to the kind of society they want to live in. But the term “equality” is poorly understood, and the desire to see real action taken, and to see real money spent, is muted by the concern that this is actually about giving preferential treatment to particular groups. So people don’t always say that they want equality. What they do want, and what I think captures a richer definition of equality, is fairness. This means going beyond simplistic understandings of equality towards a recognition of the barriers which prevent some people taking up the opportunities others enjoy. And it involves a more equal distribution of freedom – real chances to pursue the life that you would choose.

People want fairness in their local communities – and as you all know, the communities with the most blatantly unfair, unequal distributions of wealth and privilege and power are the ones with the most tension, the places where people don’t want to live. Everyone wants to tackle inequality. Everyone wants to live in a fairer society. So if local authorities are accountable to the people they represent, then delivering equality will be at the heart of what they do.

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Local democracy needs to be used between elections, not just at elections, to make sure that local authorities are delivering equality for the communities they serve. Local people need to have the right to initiate action against large and persistent equality gaps, using petitions and the proposed community call for action to point to the need for change and to make their local authorities deliver it. I’d like to see more use of referenda on policy questions – what equality gaps are voters prepared to tolerate? The objectives of local government should be set by voters, not by deals between politicians in smoke-filled rooms. There aren’t any smoke-filled rooms now that the smoking ban has come in, of course, so perhaps some of the ground has been laid for the cultural shift we need.

And it is a cultural shift – one that’s already started, but needs to continue. The focus of local government has to be on outcomes, not on processes; on results, not on paper-shuffling. The framework we set out in the Equalities Review gives 10 dimensions of freedom, a list of capabilities which people should have, but which some individuals and some groups are denied. Different local authorities will have different levels of inequality to deal with, in different areas, and it will be for them to decide where the focus needs to be, informed by the people they represent. You don’t all face the same challenges. The framework allows universal, national priorities to be interpreted and taken forward in a specific, local setting.

This process of making your own equality policies, responsive to local needs, can be encouraged by positive public sector duties to promote equality. These can build on the lessons learned from the existing duties on race, disability and gender and require the setting of equality objectives, to transform the culture and practice of government and public authorities. And, perhaps as part of this, we have the opportunity of finally taking the bull by the horns on the question of public sector procurement.

The public sector spends billions of pounds a year on procurement. Requiring suppliers to follow sound equalities principles, and to adopt the provisions of an updated public sector duty to promote equality, could have a profound impact. Despite some good practice, public bodies have not used the race equality duty extensively to influence practice in the voluntary and private sectors when procuring or commissioning goods or services - and it's too early to say whether they are using the new duties to promote disability and gender equality. Now, as we start to think about a single equality duty, we need to ensure that this starts to change: otherwise, as well as missing opportunities, we will exacerbate the lack of clarity for suppliers that occurs without a single system for embedding equalities into procurement and commissioning.

What would a better system look like? First and most importantly, it should be about outcomes – not processes. Secondly, it should be consistent and coherent across the different areas of equality. Thirdly, it must address both the question of whether suppliers’ workforces are representative of their local areas, and how service providers meet the needs of those communities. These are questions for local government, as commissioners of goods and services. You have huge buying power, and if you use that to demand equality standards from your suppliers, you can make a huge difference.

This is an exciting time to be thinking about equality, with change at the top of government, change planned to equality legislation, and a new Commission for Equality and Human Rights about to start work. There’s a lot up for grabs. I’m glad the Equalities Review is setting the agenda on all this, and I’m glad you want to be part of it. By embedding equality at the heart of its work, local government can be a transformative, liberating force in the lives of the people you serve. I’m delighted you’re here to think about how that can be done, and I’m looking forward to working to deliver equality with you.

Thank you.

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