Scotland - a land of unlimited potential - but not if you are black, disabled, LGB, religious, or a woman

Some of my more recent blogs have been taking a long hard look at the workforce equalities monitoring performance of the two major public sector employers in Scotland - the NHS and councils.

You might have thought than government ministers would have wanted to do the same and some years ago.  You might think that in order to give reality to the First Minister's claim that Scotland is "a land of unlimited potential" that ministers would want to have in their hands the evidence that people from the major equality communities are able to cast aside discrimination which limits their potential.  You might think that.  I can find no evidence of them doing so.

It was only when I started to look at NHS Scotland's own data on disabled people on the payroll and then the numbers of BME people on council payrolls that I started to uncover the scale of the discrimination and the impact it has on individual people's lives.  And how the First Minister's slogan 'a land of unlimited potential' is a damned lie when it comes to people from the equality communities in Scotland.

In the NHS in Scotland, and using the data published by them, there is evidence to show that 19,000 disabled people are missing from the payroll, and missing the opportunity to live to their full potential by being in work.

For BME people, the same data tells us that just 2.3% of the NHS workforce in Scotland is from the BME community.  The EHRC calculates the UK public sector, on average, has a BME employment rate of 8%.  With a workforce of 154,366, that should equate to over 12,300 BME people working in our NHS.  The NHS data tells us that at March 2012 just 4,385 people identified as BME.  That represents a shortfall of some 8,000 posts which should be filled by people identifying as BME - if the NHS wanted to evidence race equality.
On LGB equality, the NHS has 1,276 [0.8%] workers who identify as being LGB.  The EHRC workforce has 8% of its staff identifying as LGB.  HM Treasury calculates that the LGB proportion of the UK working population is 6%.  If you use 6%, the total number of LGB staff in our NHS should be 9,262.  That would suggest that almost 8,000 LGB people are missing from our NHS workforce, and are having their potential suffocated.

In the context of religion and belief, the NHS offers no safe haven as an employer.  Staff are so scared or reluctant to identify their religion that over 73,000 people refuse to identify themselves in this way.  If the NHS had created a workplace culture where religious tolerance and respect was obvious and an everyday reality, I doubt if 73,000 staff would still be scared to identify in this way.

Then I started to look at councils in Scotland.  They are reported to employ, between them, 254,800 people.  One of my recent blogs suggests that if we apply the EHRC estimate of the BME employment rate in the public sector at 8% to the profile of councils in Scotland, we find something like 17,800 BME people are missing from the workforce of councils.

And then we have women.  The NHS Scotland employment data doesn't offer anything on women in the context of equalities monitoring.  Another NHS Scotland report from 2009 offered a comprehensive snap-shot of where equalities work was across all the equality communities.  When it came to equal pay, 3 out of 22 NHS Boards claimed to be meeting their legal duty.  Only 1 Board offered evidence of meeting the duty.  Even with a woman in charge of the NHS in Scotland and in charge of equalities, equal pay is not happening in the NHS.  

The potential of women in Scotland, like all other people from the equality communities, is being crushed by the apathy of government, by its paucity of ideas with which to eliminate discrimination, and its deep-rooted reluctance to cascade power-sharing from those who have equality to those they routinely discriminate against.  If government can't deliver equality for all, it has clearly reached the end of its own potential and should make way for a government which can deliver equality.