Equality - in another galaxy, and far, far, far away from the reality of what is happening Scotland's Councils

Recent research into data published by Scotland's Councils on whether equality of employment opportunity is being delivered for people who identify as Catholic, or for BME people, or for disabled people, shows that across all of Scotland's 32 Councils the reality of such equality is like yet another Star Wars movie - in another galaxy and far, far, far away.

For disabled people, the average across 32 Councils shows that just 2.25% of those employed in all 32 Councils identify as disabled - when population data shows almost 20% of Scots identify as disabled.



Catholic people fare little better when it comes to getting work in a Council.  Just 4.59% of all Council workers identify as Catholic, when Scotland's population has almost 16% identifying as Catholic.  Just 3 of Scotland's 32 Councils do manage to show that equality of employment opportunity can be delivered, leaving the other 29 unable to evidence that discrimination against Catholics has been eliminated.

With Catholics and disabled people largely marginalised by Councils when it comes to work, the performance of Councils on race equality in employment is equally far, far and yet even farther away than even Spielberg could have imagined.  The average rate across all 32 Councils shows that just 1.13% of workers identify as Black Minority Ethnic [BME].  At the same time, population data reveals 4% of Scotland's population identifying as BME.  Some city Councils have a population profile where the data reveals a much higher proportion identifying as BME and yet it is only in 3 non-city Councils out of 32 where the workforce profile matches or exceeds the local Council population profile of BME people.  The other 29 Councils in Scotland are unable to provide evidence that race discrimination has been eliminated in their workplace practices and cultures.  

All the evidence available suggests that there is a clear lack of desire or will to change what is institutional discrimination across Scotland's Councils.  Government is making no overt or muscular effort to trigger the radical change required.  The Equality & Human Rights Commission [EHRC] has surrendered any active enforcement of the regulations which were framed to secure the delivery of equality in the workplace.

Equality is clearly an alien concept to those responsible for running Councils, government and the EHRC, which is probably why equality remains a reality which exists as far, far, far and even farther away as it is possible to kick down the road and into the future of work to be done by someone else, in some other century and perhaps even on some other planet when the earth itself has been allowed to expire.

NHS in Scotland unable - or unwilling - to audit equality training and demonstrate whether it is reducing and eliminating discrimination or maintaining the status quo

Changing the status quo is never easy.  The natural instinct of those in charge of the status quo is to keep things as they are because it invariably means life is comfortable for them and people like them.

Several decades ago laws were introduced and work started on what is now commonly termed 'equality', triggered by a number of issues around overt racism in the UK.  That anti-racism work has been going on since then and growing to encompass work aimed at ending discrimination experienced by disabled people, women, lesbian, gay and bisexual people, Catholic people and others.  While in those intervening decades we have witnessed how we have the capacity to create huge change - from mobile phones to pictures of the surface of Mars - it seems that no matter how much effort we put in to 'equality' the same people continue to remain exiled, through discrimination, to living on the very margins of what we call society.

In an effort to understand why we have collectively failed to change the status quo, I looked at how employers trained staff in how they could help the employer change and eliminate discrimination in how they functioned.  I thought NHS Scotland would be a good sample of the public sector to examine and sent all of Scotland's 22 health boards a Freedom of Information request and focusing on critical aspects of how they trained their workforce in 'equality'.  You can read the research report here.  There are quite a number of revelations.

One of these is the focus of this blog.

Boards were asked for evidence that they evaluated the training they give staff [over 163,000 work in the NHS in Scotland] on equality and eliminating discrimination was actually leading to a measurable reduction in discrimination and that they were on track for eliminating discrimination.  

The research showed that there is no viable evaluation going on across NHS Scotland of whether equality training is doing what it should.  Considerable resources, time, creativity and effort has been and is being given over to training NHS Scotland staff in eliminating discrimination and on the Equality Act 2010 - yet there is no real check or audit or evaluation as to whether discrimination is being reduced, eliminated or indeed if it is increasing.

One Board, NHS Dumfries and Galloway, did grasp the scale of the challenge in evaluating equality training in relation to the goal of eliminating discrimination :

Equality training should eventually lead to a workforce which has a greater understanding of equality and diversity in relation to both staff and patients. It is hoped that over time, we will see a reduction in complaints which relate to equality and diversity and that greater awareness will be reflected within our staff Dignity at Work survey. Training and awareness features as part of our equality and diversity outcomes report and mainstreaming report but is something within which success is difficult to measure as it requires change to our culture which happens over a long period of time.

Credit to NHS Dumfries and Galloway for recognising the scale of the challenge.

Jeane Freeman
Cabinet Secretary for Health

The reality remains that significant resources are being used across NHS Scotland to train staff in equality - and no-one is checking to see if it offers value for money or if it is eliminating discrimination.  If the NHS is unable to show discrimination is being eliminated as an employer, it is more than likely that it is unable to evidence that it is eliminating discrimination in how it delivers health services.  Will Cabinet Secretary for Health, Jeane Freeman change the status quo in the NHS when it comes to equality or maintain it pretty much as is in the same way as her predecessor ?

Inferior equality training provided for most NHS Scotland staff - institutional discrimination remains deep rooted.

Changing the status quo is never easy.  The natural instinct of those in charge of the status quo is to keep things as they are because it invariably means life is comfortable for them and people like them.

Several decades ago laws were introduced and work started on what is now commonly termed 'equality', triggered by a number of issues around overt racism in the UK.  That anti-racism work has been going on since then and growing to encompass work aimed at ending discrimination experienced by disabled people, women, lesbian, gay and bisexual people, Catholic people and others.  While in those intervening decades we have witnessed how we have the capacity to create huge change - from mobile phones to pictures of the surface of Mars - it seems that no matter how much effort we put in to 'equality' the same people continue to remain exiled, through discrimination, to living on the very margins of what we call society.

In an effort to understand why we have collectively failed to change the status quo, I looked at how employers trained staff in how they could help the employer change and eliminate discrimination in how they functioned.  I thought NHS Scotland would be a good sample of the public sector to examine and sent all of Scotland's 22 health boards a Freedom of Information request and focusing on critical aspects of how they trained their workforce in 'equality'.  You can read the research report here.  There are quite a number of revelations.

One of these is the focus of this blog.

When asked how the equality training was delivered most Health Boards indicated they used a mix of e-modules and classroom settings.  Two Health Boards [Grampian and Orkney] were unequivocal - they used what they called 'face-to-face' training.  Those Health Boards explained :

"All of our Equality and Diversity training is delivered “face to face”. Research done by another Health Board and followed up by NHS Grampian and NHS Orkney has shown that “face to face” training is vastly superior to e-learning in this field for a number of reasons"

If we accept the position of NHS Grampian and NHS Orkney - that their face-to-face method of training delivery is 'vastly superior to e-learning' - then it is reasonable to conclude that much of the equality training delivered by the other 20 Health Boards in Scotland is vastly inferior.

Jeane Freeman, Cabinet Secretary for Health

Is this single issue the reason why NHS Scotland seems unable to pull up the deep roots of institutional discrimination which are in evidence from the employment data the Health Boards publish on a regular basis ?  I have sent a copy of the research report to the new Cabinet Secretary for Health and invited her comment on the superior/inferior delivery of equality training across NHS Scotland.  

Blowing the bloody doors off institutional discrimination in Scotland ? It is easier to open the gates of heaven.

If the goal of artists is to open the gates of heaven[1], then the aim of equality work must be to blow the bloody doors off[2] the institutional discrimination in Scotland which keeps so many people living at the margins of what we call society.

For much of this decade, opened with the Equality Act 2010, I have been wondering why it is that measurable, visible progress with eliminating discrimination has become so ponderously slow.  I was recently reminded of just how pitifully slow it is when someone else put it into a slightly different context.  In an article from the Independent newspaper on Equal Pay, Young Women's Trust chief executive Carole Easton said "at the current rate [of progress], today's young women will be retired before equal pay becomes a reality".

If we are to change the pace on making equality a reality and ensure the privileged status quo gives ground in our life times, it is critical to understand what it is behind the eye-wateringly slow pace of change.  In an effort to try and narrow down the reasons for the delays to the core causes, I undertook some research into one of Scotland's biggest public sector employers, NHS Scotland.  As at March 2018, the 22 Health Boards which make up NHS Scotland were reporting that they employed 169,467 people.  Training and re-training almost 170,000 people must suck up a lot of resources, so I used a freedom of information request to ask them all what was the aim of their equality training, how they delivered it, and how they checked whether the training they provided was actually helping them to eliminate discrimination from their roles as employers and service providers.  

The key findings revealed by the responses go some way to explaining why equality keeps getting kicked down the road in the public sector in Scotland.

• Some Health Boards use ‘fair’ or ‘fairness’ in conjunction with equality, sometimes conflating the two. Given that achieving equality requires the elimination of discrimination and that ‘fairness’ is a relative state, it is likely that the confusion between discrimination and fairness will, for as long as it continues to inhabit the corporate thinking of public bodies, simply serve to sustain institutional discrimination.  It is possible to imagine that this confusion is a deliberate act with the clear intention of delaying the arrival of equality and the elimination of discrimination
• Many of Scotland’s 22 Health Boards are doing equality work - and the training in it - because they have to, by law, not because they are passionate about it and believe it is the right thing to do.  
• the NHS in Scotland lacks clarity and coherency on why equality training is being delivered.  This means that for many staff their journey towards eliminating discrimination will find them arrive at some very different places and often that will not be a place where discrimination has been eliminated.
• NHS Grampian and NHS Orkney use classroom-style training and declare this approach ‘vastly superior’ to online delivery of training, meaning the rest of the NHS is using an inferior training delivery model
• NHS Health Scotland provides mandatory ‘unconscious bias’ training to all managers. Yet the Scottish Parliament’s Equal Opportunities Committee reported in 2016 that ‘unconscious bias’ training is “not the solution and can serve to mask underlying negative attitudes towards people from an ethnic minority background.”
• From the 169,000 workers Health Boards reported as working for them at March 2018, they were only able to positively identify that 37,398 of them had received equality training
• quality assurance as a concept is poorly understood and little or no quality assurance of equality training content across the NHS is actually being undertaken
• all Health Boards were asked what methodology they used to evaluate the effectiveness of equality training in helping them eliminate discrimination in their roles as employers and as service providers. This research reveals that there are no regular, structured checks being made across NHS Scotland on whether the significant efforts, time and resources being invested in equality training are yielding an equally significant reduction in and clear path to the elimination of discrimination in the NHS as an employer and as a service provider

In brief, NHS Scotland has for some years now been training one of the biggest workforces in Scotland on equality and the elimination of discrimination - and has not a clue whether that training is making any difference at all, good or bad.  In order to change from what the NHS is now and what it needs to be when discrimination has been eliminated, the NHS needs to construct a 3-D model of what it will look like once the changes have been achieved.  The Cabinet Secretary for Health doesn't know what the NHS should look like with discrimination eliminated, nor does the Chief Executive of NHS Scotland, and nor do the Chief Executives of each of the 22 Health Boards have a 3-D model of their own workforce or service profiles.  

The NHS in Scotland is training workers to help it change and reach a destination it is unable to describe in any detail.

The present leadership in Scotland in the form of government ministers, senior civil servants advising ministers, and the senior staff running the 22 Health Boards, are clearly culpable in the shambles of how NHS staff are being trained to play their part in eliminating discrimination.  Not only are they not prepared to blow the bloody doors off institutional discrimination in Scotland's NHS, they have locked the doors and thrown away the keys to ensure that institutional discrimination remains securely parked in Scotland's public sector.

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[1] Ed Ruscha, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/jun/12/ed-ruscha-interview-america-decline-course-of-empire-national-gallery

[2] Charlie Croker, The Italian Job

Equal Pay is not just about the size of or even closing the Gap

Interest in equal pay has been given a temporary jump-start this month, with private sector organisations employing over 250 people in Great Britain being forced to publish details on their equal pay gaps.  Before applauding that as positive or as progress, keep in mind that legislation on equal pay has been in place since 1970, almost 50 years ago.

In Scotland a different approach was taken to implementing the terms of the 2010 Equality Act on equal pay.  The public sector has been required to publish equal pay gaps every two years, as between women and men, and more recently the equal pay gaps between disabled people and non-disabled people, and between BME people and non-BME people.  One of the problems in Scotland has been the inability of the public sector to agree a universal methodology for calculating the equal pay gap and publishing the findings.  The Equality & Human Rights Commission has chosen not to impose a common approach or to enforce the law, instead seeking to encourage employers to do the right thing.  The outcome is a dodgy dossier of data on equal pay which helps public sector bodies hide from real scrutiny and real accountability.  All the time the equal pay gaps remain stubbornly in place.

For example in NHS Scotland, research in 2017 showed that the equal pay gap between women and men employed there amounted to 19.99%, an increase on what research revealed in 2015 when data published by NHS Boards put the gap at 18.85% - in favour of men.  The findings of these research reports and the detail underpinning the sizes of the equal pay gaps have been shared with Scottish government.  

Both the Cabinet Secretary for Health and the Cabinet Secretary for Equalities have declined to intervene either with the EHRC or with Scotland's 22 NHS Boards.  Curiously, Scottish government Cabinet Secretaries have declined to act on suggestions that data on equal pay gaps [and equality data generally] be published on a central web site hosted by government.  This would allow everyone to easily access and compare equality data of interest to them and gives oxygen to the democratic principles of transparency and accountability.  Yet in Westminster, the equal pay gap data being gathered across the UK from the private sector, voluntary sector and England's public sector will be published on both the organisation's own web site as well as the government's gender pay gap reporting web site.

Angela Constance [left]
Cabinet Secretary for Communities, 
Social Security and Equalities

Shona Robison
Cabinet Secretary for Health and Sport

Part of the enduring mystery over the size of the equal pay gap in Scotland's NHS is that it operates a pay system which should, if scrupulously adhered to, eliminate or reduce to statistically insignificant levels any equal pay gap.

For this reason, additional research into pay in NHS Scotland was undertaken this year.  In simple terms, all of Scotland's NHS Boards were asked to split their workforce by earnings, either side of a pay point £25,806, which is close to Scotland's median pay point of £23,150.  As a benchmark test, Scottish government was asked to provide similar data around a split of £25,682 [they use different pay scales].  They were asked to do this for women and men, for disabled people and non-disabled people, and for Black Minority Ethnic [BME] people and non-BME people.

When the split was applied to all employees, it showed the NHS in Scotland has in-built pay inequality, with the majority of staff earning less than a minority of staff,

 In contrast, data on Scottish government staff shows the majority of staff earn more than the minority of staff.

The NHS data was reconfigured to show women and men in both pay cohorts.  This shows that 62.06% of women working in the NHS are in the lower paid cohort, while for men, just 49.16% of them are in the lower paid cohort.  It is the sheer scale of occupational segregation in NHS Scotland which creates and sustains the size of the equal pay gap.  

Until and unless the occupational segregation in the NHS and across the public sector is acknowledged and work led by government on eliminating occupational segregation is forced through at speed, women will continue to be expected to shore up the low paid end of the pay systems in the public sector so that men can continue to monopolise their hold on the better paid jobs.

Scotland's FGM National Action Plan - Scottish government lacks data on whether women are being protected

John Swinney
Cabinet Secretary for Education
 and Skills

is unable to tell you whether Scotland's
universities as employers are eliminating
sectarianism and discrimination against 
Catholic people

Scotland's Cabinet Secretary for Health, Shona Robison, knows when people waiting for NHS cancer treatments or for hearing tests have had their guarantee on treatment times broken by any Health Board.  

The Cabinet Secretary for Education, John Swinney, knows when targets for wider access to universities for students from Scotland's most deprived backgrounds is not being met, with the most recent target set at 20% of Scotland's university students to be from 20% of the most deprived areas by 2020.

Shona Robison
Cabinet Secretary for Health
and Sport

can't tell you whether NHS Scotland as an
employer is eliminating racism as an employer
because she chooses not to have the data
gathered which would help inform her

What Shona Robison  can't tell you is whether NHS Scotland as an employer is eliminating racism as an employer, because she chooses not to have the data gathered which would help inform her on that question.  Likewise John Swinney is unable to tell you whether Scotland's universities as employers are eliminating sectarianism and discrimination against Catholic people, because he chooses not to have the data gathered which would help inform him on that question.

Put simply, government ministers cannot know whether progress is being made with policies and strategies in their areas of responsibility unless they put in place data and evidence gathering systems which help inform them if progress is being made or if they are simply describing ever-decreasing circles in the sand of poorly constructed policies and strategies.

In 2005, the then government in Scotland put in place an Act aimed at the prohibition of female genital mutilation [FGM].  In February 2016, the current government published a national action plan to prevent and eradicate FGM.  Three of the primary outcomes set in the national action plan were :

• prioritise protection from, and prevention of, FGM
• provide services and appropriate support for those who have experienced FGM
• hold perpetrators to account

Using a Freedom of Information request, I asked government some questions on what progress had been made with the aims of the Act and the current national action plan.  I asked for data and evidence on :

• the number of women in Scotland protected from FGM as a result of work under this strategy and since the Act of 2005
• the number of incidents in Scotland where FGM was prevented as a result of work under this strategy and since the Act of 2005
• the number of incidents where women in Scotland who have experienced FGM have been provided with support as a result of work under this strategy and since the Act of 2005
• the number of FGM perpetrators in Scotland who have been arrested as a result of work under this strategy and since the Act of 2005
• the cumulative jail terms served by all FGM perpetrators as a result of work under this strategy and since the Act of 2005
• the total funding provided by government to organisations providing protection from FGM, prevention of FGM, services and support to those who have experienced FGM, and additional funds provided to such as Police Scotland in the work required to hold perpetrators to account – and since the Act of 2005

The answers ?  Scottish government does not know how many women in Scotland have been protected from FGM.  Scottish government does not know how many times FGM was prevented.  Scottish government does not know how many women experiencing FGM have had support under the strategy.  The reason Scottish government does not know the answers is formally put as "this information is not held by Scottish government".  It is reasonable to conclude that not only does government not hold the information but that it has not asked other organisations to provide it with the information.  It chooses not to be informed.

When asked about how many FGM perpetrators had been arrested, the response was, again, that government did not hold this information.  It did however point out that Police Scotland would hold it.  Scottish government has again chosen not to inform itself of this crucial data set.

On cumulative jail terms for all FGM perpetrators since 2005, Scottish government was informed enough to admit that the answer was zero - explaining that there have been no convictions in Scotland for FGM related offences.

On funding the work under the strategy, government advised that Police Scotland has received no additional funding for preventing and eradicating FGM.  On funding work under the strategy, government provided details of grants awarded since 2012/13.  These, in round figures, indicate spending of over £2,200,000 on work in providing protection from FGM, prevention of FGM and support to those who have experienced FGM.

Angela Constance [left]
Cabinet Secretary for Communities,
Social Security and Equalities

has chosen not to have the data or
evidence gathered which would inform her as
to whether the National Action Plan on FGM
is effective

In summary, we have an Act of the Scottish Parliament on FGM, a Scottish Government National Action Plan aimed at preventing and eradicating FGM, we have innumerable organisations funded to do work delivering the aims of the National Action Plan, and we have spent at least £2,200,000 in enabling that work.  We have all of that and yet not one person has gone to jail for carrying out FGM or being involved in carrying out FGM.

Based on the response from Scottish government, the Cabinet Secretary for Communities, Social Security and Equalities, Angela Constance, has chosen not to have the data or evidence gathered which would allow her to be informed as to whether Scottish government's National Action Plan on FGM is effective.  To be fair, if one must, she simply follows the example of other Cabinet Secretaries who choose to remain uninformed as to whether progress on equality in their areas is being made, based on data and evidence gathering systems they put in place to ensure they are informed - or in this case, uninformed.