Thousands of BME people 'missing' from payrolls of Scotland's councils

Scotland.  The '"land of unlimited potential" said First Minister Alex Salmond, just before attending the world première of an animated Disney film in Los Angeles in June this year.  

After several decades of law on race equality, you would expect that Scotland's BME community would be demonstrably fulfilling their potential, equally with everyone else, on the payrolls of Scotland's major public sector employers.  You would expect.

Scottish government statistics tell us that in the first quarter of 2012, the total number of staff employed in local government [excluding police, fire services] was 254,800. These statistics do not, sadly, tell the reader much beyond the bald figures.  For reasons which are not clear, equalities profiling of council staff is not mainstreamed into the links between councils and government when gathering the data.  Odd, given government has been pushing the mainstreaming specific equality duty on public bodies.

At the moment, the only way to find out the ethnic [and everything else apart from gender] profile of all Scotland's council workforce is to search 32 council web sites for the monitoring reports, which should already be routinely published and accessible.  The reality is somewhat different.  

Not all councils follow a similar template for reporting, nor do they all follow a similar pattern of location for web site publishing, they do not all have up to date reports [some are still stuck on a 2006 version], and some are so well hidden I have had to ask for the reports to be sent to me.  Out of the 32 councils, 11 do not provide readily and easily accessible data on ethnic profiling.

At the moment, based on the self-reporting of 24 councils and with the data being anything up to 6 years out of date, the data across these councils shows that :

• the total workforce for 24 councils is 210,251
• the average %age of workers across those councils identifying as 'white' is 81.41%
• the average %age of workers identifying as BME is 0.99%
• the average %age of workers declining or too scared to identify their ethnicity is 17.30%

A helpful context to this is provided by the employment monitoring reports published by the Equality & Human Rights Commission.  For 2010-11, the Commission reported on the ethnicity profile of its workforce, saying that :

• 78% of employees were from a white background
• 20% of employees were of an ethnic minority background
• the proportion of their ethnic minority employees is significantly higher than in both the UK public sector, at 8 per cent, and the overall UK workforce

So, "unlimited potential" for BME people in Scotland ?

Scottish government's own confused and complicated race equality framework has, deep in the bowels of what has to be the most inaccessible policy on race equality in Scotland, a series of targets in its capacity as an employer.  These are now a bit stale in that they still aim for 2011.  No matter.  For BME workers, Scottish government aims to have 2% across all grades [this is based on census data from 2001 - well out of date].

Apply that 2% target to the entire Scottish council workforce - 254,800 - and you get 5,096 BME people who should be working in councils.  But the average in councils is 1.02% - which means the real number of BME people working in councils will be closer to 2,599.  Looks like a shortfall of about 2,500 people.  Only two councils exceed the 2% 'target' of BME staff on the payroll - Aberdeenshire and Edinburgh.

If we were to use the EHRC data of 8% BME employment rate in the public sector, then the total figure of BME people working for all councils should be 20,384.  That being so, over 17,700 BME people are being kept out of working for councils in Scotland.

Scotland's councils are supposed to be major partners with government in delivering change in Scotland, including the elimination of discrimination.  The data shows that councils as employers are failing to deliver equality for BME people.  After decades of race equality law, this can be no accident.  This data represents clear evidence of structural and institutional discrimination against the BME community across councils in Scotland, with thousands of BME people paying the price and being kept out of work as a direct result.