Scotland's Councils as employers being run by and for WASPs with privilege - government and EHRC decline to intervene

Ten years ago, in the dying days of Gordon Brown's government, the Equality Act 2010 as rushed through the last stages of parliamentary scrutiny and scrambled on the the statute book.  Over the period of time that followed, David Cameron's government ripped sections out of the Act, watered down other sections, and performed crude dentistry on the powers of the Equality and Human Rights Commission [EHRC].

As with any law, valuable time could be wasted in picking over the mistakes in drafting the Bill, mourning the opportunities lost in Cameron's filleting of the Act, and denouncing the massive funding cuts to the EHRC budget.  Or we could look at what public bodies have actually done in a decade of work focused on delivering the core aim of the Act - to eliminate discrimination - and decide whether the Act is delivering for the people it aimed to help - those discriminated against on an almost daily basis.

Over the intervening decade since the Equality Act 2010, 'Equality Here, Now' has carried out regular research into what Scotland's public bodies have been doing to rise to the challenges of the Act and eliminate discrimination through change in the polices, practices and cultures of how they deliver services and operate as employers.  Most recently, this has involved scrutiny of what Scotland's 32 local authorities [Councils] published in their function as employers on the workforce profile of people employed by them, and by the protected characteristics of disability, ethnicity, sexual orientation and religion.

What that research found was that the fundamental flaws in how Councils are gathering and using employment data are unchanging from what data they published in previous years and that the often marginal movements/improvements in percentages reported against each protected characteristic are simply a result of modest improvements in data gathering and reporting.  Put simply.  There has been for some years and continues to be today a complete lack of evidence that Scotland's Councils are actively seeking out discrimination within their cultures, practices and systems and eliminating the root causes of that discrimination.  For these reasons, the research report published in May 2020 offered no analysis of why discrimination continues to be evidenced, sometimes conspicuously, in the 32 workplace data profiling reports published by Scotland’s Councils in 2019.  It has all been said before in previous research reports since 2013 and nothing in what Councils are still doing – and still not doing – has changed in any meaningful way.

At the most basic level of scrutiny, we know that Scotland’s Councils have 2.16% of all workers identifying as disabled.  The Scottish government’s equality evidence finder reveals that Scotland, at 2018, has a national average of adult people identifying as disabled at 32% of the population.  

Glasgow Centre for Population Health estimates, in a study from 2017, that Scotland would have, by 2020, an average of over 5% of the population identifying as Black Minority Ethnic [BME] and increasing to 7% by 2031.  Councils in Scotland are reporting an average across all Councils of 1.29% of the workforce identifying as BME.

Councils also reveal that in 2019 the proportion of the Scotland-wide workforce identifying as Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual [LGB] is 0.69%.  The government’s equality evidence finder reports that the proportion of the Scottish adult population identifying as LGB as at 2017 is 2%.  The final protected characteristic tracked in the research report was religion or belief and with a particular focus on the employment of people who identify as Catholic.  Data published by the 32 Councils reveal that 6.54% of their workforce identify as Catholic people.  The equality evidence finder on government’s web site provides the wider context that in Scotland 14.3% of the adult population identifies as Catholic people.

These basic numbers reveal all too clearly that Scotland’s Councils are light years away from being even close to delivering employment equality, after having had 10 years of opportunity to make the aims of the Equality Act 2010 a reality for people looking to escape discrimination and gain equal access to employment.  There are no obvious reasons why this should be the case.  Applying Occam’s razor would suggest the most likely reason for the complete and sustained failure is that there is a marked lack of appetite in local government for changing a status quo in a Scotland which is largely run by and for WASP [White Anglo Saxon Protestant] privilege.

For Scottish government and the Equality & Human Rights Commission [EHRC] to be aware of this and not to actively intervene and drive the real change required, suggests WASP privilege is similarly indulged by government and the EHRC.