Trevor Phillips’ speech to the Joseph Roundtree Foundation’s conference launching ‘Poverty: does ethnicity matter?’

Thank you.

You’ve made quite a splash today. It is unusual for me to be speaking at a conference where the controversy is generated by someone else, but for once I am happy to be in that position. And that I am delighted to be here to support the launch of this extremely illuminating series.

I use the word illuminating advisedly.

Some of you will have heard me say before that I regard this as the century of two great challenges for humankind – how we treat our planet and how we treat each other. Today we focus on the latter challenge – how we live together graciously, to use Isaiah Berlin’s phrase, in a new and more diverse society.

There has been much talk in recent times about a variety of issues arising from diversity which are tricky, controversial and massively under-researched: inequality, alienation, cultural difference, multiculturalism, inter-culturalism, integration, segregation, polarisation, concentration, under-achievement. We could spend the whole day adding more. The list goes on. That is not to say that there has been no research or that we know nothing; but when we consider the resources devoted to the challenge of climate change compared to understanding the dilemmas associated with human diversity one has to wonder if we have our priorities right.

Yes, its true that in time, the earth may be made uninhabitable for humans by our neglect of the environment. But for many human beings life today is near intolerable already because of poverty, fear and conflict arising, in part at least from inequality. Turning the temperature down in our homes may save us six generations from now; but I wonder if we ought to be more worried about the simmering tensions in our communities that could erupt six months or six weeks or six days from now.

That is why this work matters so much. At present we still do not understand as well as we should how to manage the emerging hyper-diversity of our societies in the West. Across Europe, migration is changing the complexion and the accent of our societies. They are all the richer for that; but we cannot simply assume that all will be well. We need to understand this rapid change and plan for more of it.

We know how quickly we are changing. It isn’t as some people would have it that Britain is overcrowded. By any historical standard that just isn’t the case. One of the underlying issues for the Scottish electorate is what to do about their ageing, shrinking population; when the whole of the UK goes to the polls party leaders will have to answer the difficult question – who will pay for our pensions? To tell the truth, we really need to be thinking about the opposite threat to our prosperity – that there won’t be enough of us rather than too many.

But that very fact means that we are likely to experience growing ethnic diversity, certainly in the short term, if we want to continue prospering as a nation; and it’s not at all clear to me that we are ready to do so. At our last census we worried about whether we were overdoing things with 17 ethnic categories. Today we rightly worry that we aren’t specific enough; and the work in this series shows clearly that we need to work harder to grasp for example that when it comes to public policy, we dare not confuse people of Indian heritage with those of Pakistani background; that African Caribbean Britons are not the same as those Africans who arrived here by the direct and more recent routes, rather than what my family calls the ‘cruise route’; and most of all that we should never assume that things will only get better with time. Equality is not a given.

In the recently published Equalities Review, we tried amongst other things to set out a clearer definition of what we should mean by the word equality – focusing as much on what people can be and want to be as what they are. But this only makes sense if we as a community are ready to provide the framework, the infrastructure, to help people realise their full potential. That means both providing a better platform, for example better education for all, but also removing the hurdles of discrimination and bigotry. People think that we should be concentrating on raising aspirations and I agree with that, up to a point.

Only when we are well on the road to providing that platform, then and only then, when we can say that we have truly done what we can to liberate people from these imposed disadvantages, can we seriously ask them to address some of the cultural and other factors which may cause disadvantage.

If we want young black men to keep away from crime and to raise their aspirations, we need to be sure that their efforts won’t be frustrated by prejudice. If we want young Asian women to break the back of tradition and become pioneers, we need to ensure that they won’t be forced to take a job for which they are over-qualified because all the jobs go to white men.

One of the challenges for the new Commission for Equality and Human Rights will be to lead on that task – tackling discrimination and disadvantage; and explaining and articulating a vision of what equality looks like in today’s society. We say that the right vision for the future is stated simply as a Britain at ease with – and maybe confident with – all aspects of its diversity, built on fairness and respect.

But as we showed in the equalities review public concern about fairness and equality goes beyond material dimensions represented by income and wealth, or even the absence of discrimination. It includes the opportunity to be heard in the community, to enjoy family life and relationships, and the protection of all aspects of your cultural and religious identity. That makes our definitions, discussions and policies to achieve equality ever more complex.

However, we know that no society will be at ease with itself if there are deep and persistent inequalities. And one thing we can be clear about, one thing that everyone intuitively understands, is what inequality looks like. And nowhere is this more starkly drawn that in facts about poverty and ethnicity.

Broadly speaking over the past 60 years, life for most Britons has improved and we are likely to live longer, be healthier, be better educated and enjoy a lifestyle never available to our parents. But the gap between rich and poor is widening, and for some people severe material inequality is becoming entrenched. Ethnic minorities disproportionately bear the brunt of this kind of inequality.

I think the work today is not just about the tens of thousands working close to this building earning lots of money. It is deeper and more systemic.

This is borne out in the research being launched today. Ethnic minorities are twice as likely to be poor as white people. 65% of Bangladeshis in Britain are living in poverty. This compares to 55% of Pakistanis, 45% of black Africans and 30% of Indians and black Caribbeans. Over half of Pakistani and black African children in the UK, and a shocking 70% of Bangladeshi children, are growing up poor.

The direction of the trend is most disturbing thing about the poverty gap. It is trans-generational; things are getting worse generation on generation. Children from minority ethnic groups – all minority ethnic groups – are even poorer than their parents, as well as their white counterparts (Lucinda Platt, Poverty and ethnicity in the UK, April 2007). This works shows it, as does the research by the Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex for the Equalities Review. Critically the poverty gap exists for families in work as much as it does for those out of work, and I agree with the comments already made.

As Chair of the Commission for Equality and Human Rights, I am concerned with absolute poverty as well as inequality, yes. But our job is to address the fact that levels of material comfort are unevenly distributed by factors like ethnicity, gender, age and disability.

Just as people’s identities are multi-dimensional, so is the disadvantage they face. Ethnic minority women, for example, face a double penalty in the labour market, which sees even highly educated black and Asian women outstripped by white counterparts in occupation and pay. Some of the research today reveals that muslims face worse job prospects than those of other faiths (Ken Clark and Steven Drinkwater, Ethnic minorities in the labour market: dynamics and diversity, April 2007). And links between poverty and ill-health point to yet another crossover, where poverty, ethnicity and disability interweave (Sarah Salway, Long-term ill health, poverty and ethnicity, April 2007).

The CEHR is well-placed, if its does its job well, to tackle these issues in virtue of its integrated mandate. Some people are concerned that the CEHR’s integrated mandate will hinder its ability to focus on certain kinds of persistent inequality; they are concerned that there will be a dilution of the so-called ‘single’ mandates, such as race, gender and disability.

But actually the opposite is true. Disadvantage rarely fits neatly into a single category. By being able to take an approach that encompasses all variables, greater complexity and specificity will be possible. To put it crudely, putting all ethnic minorities in one category and treating them as such. This work shows this is to the disadvantage of everyone.

We will be liberated to zone in on persistent inequalities as they actually exist, rather than try to make the inequalities fit pre-existing categories. Perhaps for the first time we can separate the issue of inequality over the interests of its advocates and we can address both instead of privileging the latter over the former.

That said, let us look a little at some of the evidence that is ethnicity-specific.

Overall, there is an employment gap between ethnic minority people of working age and Whites of around 17% with Whites standing at about 76% and ethnic minorities at around 59% (Labour Force Survey, Quarterly Supplement Autumn 2005).

Education is a crucial factor. That is why we need to address the educational failure of black boys and Pakistani and Bangladeshi pupils, and also of poor white boys, which occur while pupils of Indian and Chinese heritage to exceed the achievements of all others. We need to nurture and facilitate the drive for higher education qualifications amongst black Africans, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. As Ken Clark will show in his research, the return on this investment is truly staggering.

But even once in employment, there are differentials that can’t be accounted for. Clark’s and Drinkwater’s statistical analysis reveals that once age, education and other characteristics have been controlled, persistent differences remain between ethnic minorities and their white counterparts (Ken Clark and Steven Drinkwater, Ethnic minorities in the labour market: dynamics and diversity, April 2007). This is the question posed today – does ethnicity matter? Why is it that even within occupations, there are substantial earnings gaps which particularly affect ethnic minority men in professional and managerial occupations? It is not just poverty.

There needs to be further research examining the causes of these states of affairs, but to my mind they points to the kind of ‘genteel’ discrimination that has over-taken the overt discrimination we used to see several decades ago. In today’s discrimination savvy world, when employers know they will be clobbered by the law if they refuse to employ people who are a different colour to them, they make their bias operate in more subtle ways. We will let you sit at the table, they say, but don’t expect it to be on the same terms as the rest of us. And never forget whose table you’re sitting at, by the way.

There are, it is true, some explicable differences in income. Family type, for example the prevalence of lone parents within the Afro-Caribbean and some black African populations, is an important factor. Family work status, including the high numbers of Bangladeshi and Pakistani women who are not working, who do not want to work, clearly affects the income levels for families in these groups. But, as the New Policy Institute research reveals, family type and status only explain around half of the disproportionate income poverty rates suffered by ethnic minority groups (Guy Palmer, Poverty among ethnic groups: how and why does it differ?, April 2007). There is an additional penalty faced by ethnic minorities.

This reflects on us as a nation. At a moral level, intolerable and unjustifiable levels of poverty, attributable in large part to ethnicity, are anathema to those of us who believe in justice, fairness and equality of opportunity.

Within society, the existence of large tracts of people facing disproportionate poverty clearly increases isolation and hostility. When groups of people are disproportionately poor, and live in segregated residential pockets, the double-exclusion that they face can have a catastrophic impact on society. We only need to remember the riots of Oldham and Burnley in 2001, or consider the uprising of the ethnic minority youth in the banlieues of France, to know that this is a tinder-box that easily catches fire.

The causes are not always obvious. Here in Hackney for example, a few years ago there was some research into why young black men did not get jobs in the West End. But there is only one tube in the borough, near us at Old Street, to take you west to Oxford Street. We need to look at other factors, such the dispersal of communities.

At an economic level (and, let us be blunt about it, this will be the level that levers change) failure to capture the potential contribution of these individuals emerge as a significant obstacle to growth and competitiveness over the medium and long term.

Some people think that there will be organic progress towards greater equality, and that employment and education gaps will narrow in the fullness of time as ethnic minorities, who are still catching up on the legacy of being second or third generation immigrants, level up with the rest of society.

I don’t agree, and neither did the Equalities Review. It may not surprise you that I am an interventionist in these matters. The argument fails for two reasons: firstly, there is no guarantee that trends always move towards greater equality, indeed the Equalities Review showed that inequalities are becoming entrenched if anything; secondly, even where there is a trend in the right direction, things aren’t moving anywhere near fast enough. At the current rate of change, we will only close the ethnic employment gap in 2105. That is 98 years’ away.

So, what are we going to do about it?

The first thing we need to do is understand the problem. The pieces of research that are being launched today present some compelling findings. The data will be hard to ignore. But, perhaps more importantly, the analysis is sufficiently complex and specific to reflect the issues precisely, and get beyond the slogans. More detailed work is needed in this field to enable policymakers to address them effectively. There needs to be analysis of the chain of events that causes some ethnic minorities to suffer poverty disproportionately. This will help policymakers target the interventions where, and when, they will make an impact.

The second thing we require is strengthened legislation. Anti-discrimination laws over the past forty decades have reduced some gaps, others have not closed, and others have opened up. Ethnic penalties were higher in the 1990s than in the 1970s (R. Berthoud and M. Blekesaune, Persistent employment disadvantage, 1974-2003, ISER Working Paper 2006-9, University of Essex).

What we really need now is a shift in onus within anti-discrimination law, so that it focuses on outcomes and not merely on process.

There are two ways in which this can be done. As you know, I advocate positive action. And I advocate a strong form of it. That is not the same as positive discrimination. But by changing the framework in which decisions are made, positive action can help to remedy disadvantage at a structural level; for example, by examining how job entry systems affect different groups and taking steps to ensure that application and success rates are balanced. Only by using such action we will be able to overturn unemployment inequalities at an acceptable rate.

The law could also be strengthened to enforce an equality requirement in public procurement procedures. Publicly funded services are increasingly moving towards commissioning services through a range of public, private and not-for-profit organisations. At present there is no requirement to ensure that equality audits are built into this process, central guidance often does not specify the need to address inequalities between different population groups, and external providers also have a poor record of data collection on equalities issues.

Public procurement is a much under-used tool to influence employment practices in the large number, and increasingly wide range, of supplier organisations. It is generally accepted by the business community that using procurement to promote equality in employment would be a sensible approach for government to take.

Only legislation will make both these things possible.

In addition, we need to use the other tools open to us: advocacy, policy, partnership-working and promotion.

Historically, when there have been moves to make the workplace a fairer place, and to narrow employment gaps, the strategy has been to make it easier for individuals to operate like the ‘default’ employee - white, able bodied, male and under 45. Impartiality has been defined on very specific grounds that, in being geared to a certain type of person, are in fact anything but impartial.

The last thing I want to say is that we need to take a more radical approach. It is estimated that by 2010, only a fifth of the workforce will be what is currently considered the ‘default’ employee (Office of National Statistics British Labour Market Projections 1998). The majority have become as much a minority as the rest of us. In terms of the age, family status, disability, gender, faith and sexual orientation of our population, our social and demographic landscape is changing on a scale that is comparable to the industrial revolution. Just as then, the workplace stands at the frontline of these changes. In keeping with these dramatic demographic changes, we need to redefine our notion of impartiality in the workplace so that genuine meritocracy can thrive.

In essence, we need to make some changes in the way we think about the workplace. In the end, we need to be more radical in how we approach recruitment, retention and manage diversity. It’s a big and difficult task and, as I said at the beginning, is one of the two big challenges this century.

Trevor Phillips’ speech to the Joseph Roundtree Foundation’s conference launching ‘Poverty: does ethnicity matter?’

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