Time to topple the statues to structural racism in Scotland's public sector ?

For several decades now - starting in the 1960's - there have been a variety of legal obligations on public sector bodies to find and eliminate race discrimination in how they operate.  The most recent re-visit to legislation on race equality was in the Equality Act 2010.

After more than 50 years of effort, one would imagine that the public sector in Scotland would have undertaken the bulk of the work required to identify and eliminate the shameful practices, systems and cultures which provided the foundation to racism in how they delivered services and how they recruited as employers.

If these 50+ years of effort have revealed anything, it is that simply bringing laws into being will not change the structural nature of racism.

At or around 2019, the NHS in Scotland was reporting that 3.32% of their 168,194 workforce were identifying as Black Minority Ethnic [BME] people.  Scotland's Councils were reporting that 1.29% of that 258,680 workforce identified as BME, while Scotland's universities reported 6.03% of the 48,933 workforce identified as BME.  Scotland's other public bodies, not in any of these other major sectors, reported 1.57% of the aggregated 33,429 workforce identified as BME.  Scottish government itself, expected to act as a beacon and flag-bearer towards race equality, reported that 2.1% of its workforce identified as BME.  These figures were being reported against a demographic backdrop in the form of the Scottish government's Equality Evidence Finder which reveals that BME people formed 4.6% of the adult population in Scotland in 2018.

The level of employment of BME people in Scotland’s universities is obviously underpinned by recruitment from abroad. That being the case, any benchmarking of performance on BME employment equality cannot use, for example, Scotland’s BME population [4% at the 2011 census] as a key indicator [as is done by St Andrews University] . 

The poverty in performance of the public sector, after over 50 years of effort, in delivering race equality in employment is pitiful, especially at a time when the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement has been pushing hard for a faster pace to the dismantling, sometimes literally, of structural racism across the UK.  The toppling of slave trader Edward Colston’s statue earlier this year helped trigger a serious questioning of the sloth-like progress towards race equality in the UK.  It appears that public sector employers in Scotland need to urgently review their own monuments to organisational systems, practices and cultures which clearly continue to chain them to structural discrimination on the grounds of race.

Whether those who lead in the public sector have the desire or willingness to recognise their white privilege and unpick the lock they have on jobs and power is a question to which there is no clear or obvious answer.  Just part of the obstacle to race equality is the busted flush that is accountability in the running of the public sector.  Each of the 20-odd NHS Boards in Scotland has a group of Board members appointed by Jeane Freeman, Cabinet Secretary for Health, with the main remit for them being to hold the senior paid staff in each NHS Board to account.  These Board members know how their paid staff are performing poorly on race equality [they get reports which show this] - and do nothing to change that poor performance.  Jeane Freeman and her senior civil servants know how poorly all NHS Boards are performing on race equality [she gets reports which show this] - and do nothing to end that poor performance and speed up the delivery of race equality in Scotland's NHS.  In both these scenarios, the general public/electorate has no tools with which to hold each NHS Board or the Cabinet Secretary to account.  Until such times as politicians build in effective and independent enforcement to such as the Equality Act 2010, racism in employment [and services] in the public sector in Scotland will continue to be an inevitable consequence of unchallenged white privilege.

  

Scotland's public sector offers a thin dry toast of excuses for doing nothing on disability equality

 It is now over 10 years since the Equality Act 2010 promised a bold new world order in making equality happen across the UK.  It had been intended to be the freshest policy offspring of Gordon Brown's premiership, and would have marked the start of his new term of office, this time as an elected Prime Minister.  Instead, the Equality Act 2010 became the unwanted and unloved orphan inherited by David Cameron, propped up by Nick Clegg.

In Scotland, government accepted that in the years prior to the Act, work on equality had become bogged down in the process of compliance with the then equality legislation and reporting on progress had become an end in itself instead of a vehicle for tracking and driving real change.  New 'local' regulations on how the Act would be applied in Scotland were drafted by Scottish government with the aim of dislodging the stasis which had gripped public sector progress with delivering real equality which changed the lived experiences of people.

In 2015, Equality Here, Now looked at the performance on the delivery of employment equality of public sector organisations beyond the usual suspects of NHS, Councils and Universities.  Research from then found that diverse organisations such as Visit Scotland to the Scottish Qualifications Authority were employing disabled people to the extent that they formed 2.98% of the sector workforce.  At that time, Scottish government's Equality Evidence finder resource was flagging that the proportion of the adult population identifying as disabled was 20%.

The research in 2015 concluded that - 

the employment data published by public bodies provides no evidence that there is any awareness that there could be even the remotest prospect of institutional discrimination in the sector’s employment of disabled people.  There is also no evidence that disability discrimination in employment in the sector is to be eliminated in a coherent, planned manner based on gathering good quality evidence and analysis, and linked to measurable targeted changes in the lived experiences of disabled people.  This failure of public bodies in Scotland to act decisively on institutional discrimination on the grounds of disability means that for a lot of young disabled people alive today, they will live out their lives and die before demonstrable and evidenced equality of employment opportunity is available to them.

In 2020 Equality Here, Now revisited the 2015 research, with new findings revealed that the employment rate of disabled people across this part of the public sector was 3.81% while Scottish government's Equality Evidence Finder was flagging an adult population where 32% of people identified as disabled people in 2017.

 The research concluded - the Mainstreaming Equality reports published by these public bodies offer varying promises of a ‘jam’ that purports to be the elimination of discrimination in employment, with that ‘jam’ always scheduled to arrive tomorrow.  The tomorrows promised seem never to arrive in the todays being lived now by disabled people looking for equality of opportunity in getting access to work.  When the nature of the ‘jam’ is examined closely, it is in fact often found to be the thinnest of syrups, with many of the planned Outcomes on equality taking the form of improving systems for gathering data.  This seems to be the 21^st century equivalent in Scotland’s public sector’s grappling with the delivery of equality, to the medieval scholasticism of such as Thomas Aquinas and his Summa Theologica grappling with questions such as ‘can several angels be in the same place’.

This research, carried out in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, finds that the 5 years which have slipped past since previous research in 2015 have been stuffed so full of lost opportunities to deliver employment equality for disabled people as to produce an obscenely rich foie gras of discrimination and which requires any independent observer to apply a deep and unappetisingly ableist layer on the public sector’s usual thin dry toast of excuses for doing nothing.