EHRC is creating a monitoring culture on equality which betrays the futures of the very people it is supposed to protect

Those who read this blog regularly will be aware that I expect more from the Equality & Human Rights Commission [EHRC] than it currently delivers on eliminating discrimination.  A LOT more.  The most recent blog queried whether the EHRC in Scotland had become part of the problem in being seemingly unable to find much wrong with the work of the public sector on equality.  One of their most recent EHRC reports on checking the performance of public bodies in meeting the specific equality duties seemed content to note that most of them had published something by the required date, and yet in the same breath acknowledged that there was no check on the quality of the content of what had been published.  In other words publish a crap set of data on your workforce or a crap set of plans which will do bugger all to eliminate discrimination, and the EHRC will still give you 5 stars, just for publishing your crap.

The EHRC in Scotland has published a second report which examines what public bodies have published on workforce equality data and their role as employers.  The idea is to check if they are looking at how they operate as employers and gathering and using data to check if institutional discrimination is being identified and eliminated.  The duty itself is clear.  Gather data on your workforce, analyse it, and use what it tells you to change how you recruit, train, develop and retain a diverse workforce.  Simples, no ?

Wait for it.  There are 8 protected characteristics.  Recent research, shared with the EHRC in Scotland, found that there was evidence that sectarianism was present in sectors across Scotland.  To reach this conclusion requires that public bodies gather data on all the protected characteristics, including religion and, in that context, the numbers of Catholics and Protestants employed.  The research found that the quality of data being gathered on workforce profiling was poor and in some cases non-existent.  

So.  When one reads the EHRC report on how well Scotland's public bodies have profiled their workforce, you would expect the scrutiny to pick up on the gaps and for the EHRC to move quickly to lean on the public bodies to up their game ?  No ?  Read it yourself, here.

Once more the EHRC in Scotland has set the performance bar so low, public bodies would need to work hard at not getting another 5 gold stars.  As the report itself says :

The review found that 93% of the 184 listed authorities reviewed had published information about the composition of their staff, broken down by protected characteristic. In this review authorities were assessed as reporting on the composition of their workforce if they reported on any of the eight relevant protected characteristics.

Looked at through the eyes of the EHRC, the performance of the 11 Scottish universities who did not publish data on Catholics employed by them is judged to be compliant with the law.  9 of the universities did not publish data on the sexual orientation of their workforce, but not a problem for the EHRC as they published data on such as gender so they can be given the 5 gold stars for performance.

The EHRC is creating a monitoring culture on equality which betrays the futures of the very people it is supposed to protect. 

The EHRC in Scotland has become part of the problem ....

In March 2011, a very small number of people had the courage to warn the Scottish Parliament that work on equality would betray people encountering discrimination on a daily basis if the Scottish government's proposed specific equality duties were approved.  Despite an hysterical last-minute intervention from the Equality & Human Rights Commission [EHRC] who predicted the end of the equality world as we know it if the draft specific equality duties were not approved, the Equal Opportunities Committee in the Scottish Parliament rejected government's proposals.

In May 2012, a set of improved, stronger, specific equality duties were approved, quietly, with no great fanfare, no handbag-smuggled flag-waving, no oxy-acetylene torch-bearing welding apprentices, and no media interest.

April 2013 brought a deluge of papers and data published by public bodies in their attempt to meet the requirement of the duties.

Looking at the area of data in employment equality and how well public bodies were meeting the specific equality duties, research found that for the protected characteristics of disability, race, LGB, and religion, the public sector was performing poorly and has no plans to do anything about that poor performance.  Other research also found poor performance across the public sector in the duty to publish equal pay gap data.

All of this research was shared with the EHRC in Scotland.  Their response to getting access to all of this evidence, free of charge ? :

The Commission is conducting its own assessment both of compliance with the duties – have organisations published what they are required to – and a deeper assessment of the contents of the reports, which we aim to publish over the course of the next six months.  As this work is being carried out to our own specification, whilst your information is helpful it will not be considered as part of our own assessment.

Given their lack of interest, you would think that the findings published by the EHRC from their research would be stunning material, bringing light to the darkness of lost opportunities and offering hope to those unable to get past the institutional discrimination which infects everyday life in the public sector.  You would think.

Read for yourself.  This is the report published by the EHRC on whether public bodies complied with the duty to publish, amongst other things, a profile of their workforce.  The Commission finds :

Overall the findings of this first phase have been positive ....... Scottish public authorities have performed well in terms of basic compliance with the requirements to publish their information in a transparent and accessible manner .....

Barely pausing for breath, the report goes on to say :

This report only provides headline information about whether or not relevant information has been published. What has yet to be determined is the quality and focus of what public authorities have produced .....

To translate, the EHRC has used scarce funding to commission research which finds that most public bodies have published something which meets the duty to publish something.  The EHRC then admits on the same page that there is no qualitative analysis of what has been published ........... but in the preceding sentences claims that what has been published is "transparent and accessible".  By this stage, most readers are a tad giddy from spinning around to catch up with the EHRC's shape-shifting on what the research shows.

It just keeps getting better.  Still on the same page, the report offers the insight that :

The impact of the work they [public bodies] carry out to meet their outcomes and to use their employee information will not be known for another two years .......

To again translate, the EHRC has spent scarce funds on research which cannot tell if what public bodies have published is of any value, if it is seriously crap, or even if the reports and planned actions could in themselves have the potential to create further discrimination.  

It would seem to be time for the Scottish Parliament to carry out its own research into whether the EHRC is still up to the job of acting as a catalyst for equality in Scotland.  Based on the confused and conflicted reports it is currently publishing on the performance of others, there is every reason to believe that it has lost the plot, is now part of the problem, and is no longer fit for purpose.

Scotland's Ivory Towers and Sectarianism - the squalid reality

Have you ever wondered who amongst the long list of illustrious dead from Scotland's past should be awarded the Honorary Doctorates passed out each year to the great and good by Scotland's universities ?

Just a few weeks ago, Edinburgh university granted this award to a mixed bag of people, still alive, including Eddie Reader [singer], Lynne Ramsay [film director] and Ellen Kullman [chief executive of duPont].  

James Connolly - 
we only want the earth

In May 2016 it will be 100 years since the execution of James Connolly, born in Edinburgh in June 1868 not far from Edinburgh university, and who went on to become an internationally respected socialist and freedom fighter for an independent Ireland.  Connolly's legacy to Scotland and indeed the world is massive and can certainly bear comparison with anything achieved by those on this year's list of honorary doctorates at Edinburgh university.  It would be a radical and daring decision if Edinburgh university were to award, posthumously, James Connolly an honorary degree of doctor of letters, as the quaint phrasing has it.

It would be but a small step in fostering good relations across Scotland's festering sectarian divide, where Catholics have long been kept several steps behind the progress being made by Protestants in all walks of Scottish life, whether it be in education or in employment.  Who better to recognise in this way than someone who was born in Edinburgh, in poverty, and yet who left a gigantic footprint in history on matters of equality and social justice ?

It would be naught but a small step in a Scotland which was comfortable with itself, which recognised that prejudice and discrimination are alive and affecting the lives of tens of thousands of people every day, and which was as determined to eliminate that discrimination as it appears to be determined to replace one flag with another, even at tennis matches.

Trouble is that Scotland is not comfortable with itself.  Elsewhere on this blog you will find evidence of how bigotry, prejudice and discrimination stalks the landscape of what we call the public sector in Scotland.  My more recent blogs have shown that our NHS is, after decades of ducking and diving on meeting the law on eliminating discrimination on the basis of disability, race and gender, still unable to deliver the basics of equality, such as equal pay for women.

Evidence of just how uncomfortable Scotland is with equality can be found in reports universities published in April this year to meet the newest legal duties on equality.  One of the many things they were required to do was profile their workforce according to protected characteristics, including such as whether a worker was disabled, from an ethnic minority, lesbian, gay or bisexual, and what religion/belief they identified with.  My latest research provides an overview of how Scotland's universities are performing with meeting the law and eliminating discrimination.

On the employment of Catholics, the data reveals a stunning complacency in universities.  Out of the 16 universities and schools Scotland has, 11 don't collect the data.  Just 3 universities are able to report on how many Catholics there are on their payrolls.  Out of the 38,555 people employed across the university sector just 373 identify as Catholic.  Less than 1% of the workforce.  The Scottish Bishops' Conference estimated at 2008 that the proportion of the population which is Catholic was at that time 12.9%.

As well as being poor, James Connolly was also born in Edinburgh's Cowgate of Irish parents and was a Catholic.  Edinburgh university is only able to report that just 1.77% of the workforce is Catholic.  I wonder what Edinburgh's figure will be when the centenary of his execution comes around in 2016 ?

Sectarianism distorting NHS Scotland's workforce ?

For some centuries now, being a Catholic in Scotland has not been a passport to an easy life and it has certainly not been an identity which automatically opens the armoured glass doors to employment and career development.

Just over the water, in Northern Ireland, the reality of sectarianism and discrimination has been openly acknowledged and direct action taken over the last decade has seen employment equality between Protestants and Catholics change from, in 2001, an employment rate gap of 19% in favour of Protestants to, in 2010, a gap of just over 8%.  The Equality Commission for Northern Ireland [ECNI] publishes an annual report which is based on survey returns required from all employers [private and public sector] with over 11 employees and which identify the community background of employees as well as their gender.  This enables the ECNI to properly monitor the national workforce profile and check that progress is being made to deliver real, measurable equality in employment for Catholics in Northern Ireland.  Where necessary, ECNI can and does take action.  

A simple, but powerfully effective tool which is delivering results.  Given this, it has to be asked : why does Scotland not do something similar ?  

Part of the answer has to be that Scotland doesn't like to admit that sectarianism is something which exists beyond the confines of certain football club supporters.  The implication being that as long as it is the rough, coarse working classes who maim and kill one another in the name of the Pope or King Billy, then Scotland's middle-class can sustain the charade that Scotland is a 'tolerant' country.  Another increasingly obvious reason is that Scotland's politicians and political apparatchiks don't want to know what the data on equality would tell them, whether it be about sectarianism and discrimination against Catholics, or the lack of BME people in jobs which help maintain the shape of Scotland's public services as something fit for 'people like us'. 

Scotland the White

If they don't know about the extent of racism, disablism, homophobia or the rest, they don't have to do anything beyond tokenistic hand-wringing over the more overt manifestations of discrimination.  Then the reaction is to, literally in the case of Visit Scotland in 2008, air-brush into the official documents on Scottish society a Disney-esque portrayal of shortbread-tin life in the kailyards of Brigadoon.

Scotland's new specific equality duties can help us bring an end to this self-delusion and replace it with hard evidence of how the workplace looks, without the aid of an air-brush or selective memory.

In April 2013, most of Scotland's major public bodies were required publish workforce data, profiling it by protected characteristic, including religion and belief, learning from what the data told them and then acting on it to show that they were eliminating discrimination.

Scotland the air-brushed

Recent research into what the NHS has achieved with this area of the specific equality duties suggests sectarianism and discrimination in relation  to Catholics is a reality which no amount of air-brushing or data-massaging will remove.


 We know that 19 of Scotland's 22 NHS Boards published profiling reports.  The other 3 either blissfully ignorant or simply ignoring the law.  No doubt the EHRC will be on their case.  It would be helpful if the Cabinet Secretary for Health was also to prod the 3 chief executives with a sharp performance-related-pay stick.

From the reports which were published, we know that the NHS in Scotland employs 158,326 workers.  We also know that 12,079 of them identify themselves as Catholic - just 7.63% of the workforce.  That is quite a way short of the Bishops' Conference of Scotland estimate for the Scottish Catholic population being 12.9%.

On the basis of these figures, there appears to be something like 8,345+ Catholic people missing from the payroll of Scotland's NHS.  

When performance on religious equality reveals that a town the size of Peebles would be needed to accommodate  all the Catholic people missing from the payroll of the NHS in Scotland, it is possible to conclude that sectarianism and institutional discrimination on the grounds of being a Catholic retains deep roots within the culture and practices of the NHS.

Given Visit Scotland's form in the recent past, it is worth looking at their workforce profiling report.  In this you will read that out of 763 Visit Scotland workers, just 1 identifies as Catholic.

Wedding Bells, a marriage certificate, but few P60s - is this equality ?

Scottish government has been devoting much precious legislative process and time to redressing the inequalities inherent in lesbian, gay and bi-sexual [LGB] people being able to get married in Scotland.  The wider discourse on same-sex marriage has uncovered evidence that prejudice, bigotry and homophobia in Scotland are rarely far below the scratched surface of many people's comfort zones.  To their credit, government has not allowed the opposition to same-sex marriage to deflect them from the goal of remedying an institutional inequality.

With same-sex marriage the contemporary backdrop to LGB equality in Scotland, one would have imagined a positive knock-on effect in other areas of LGB discrimination, such as in improving the employment levels of LGB people within Scotland's public sector.  Curiously and regrettably, given government's control over the public sector, the benefits remain limited to the prospects of wedding bells and have yet to witness marked improvements in the employment prospects of LGB people securing P60's within the public sector.

Recent research has looked at how the NHS in Scotland is performing in meeting the specific equality duty which requires them to profile their workforce by protected characteristic, analyse what this tells them, and then act on this so that they can better deliver employment equality - for all protected characteristics, including LGB people.  

We know that 19 of Scotland's 22 NHS Boards published profiling reports.  The other 3 either blissfully ignorant or simply ignoring the law.  No doubt the EHRC will be on their case.  It would be helpful if the Cabinet Secretary for Health was also to prod 3 chief executives with a sharp performance-related-pay stick.

From the reports which were published, we know that the NHS in Scotland employs 158,326 workers.  We also know that 1,502 of them identify themselves as LGB - just 0.95% of the workforce.  That is quite a way short of the UK government's estimate for the LGB population.  

On the basis of these figures, there appears to be something like 7,998+ LGB people missing from the payroll of Scotland's NHS.  

When performance on LGB equality reveals that a town the size of Oban would be needed to accommodate  all the LGB people missing from the payroll of the NHS in Scotland, it is possible to conclude that institutional discrimination in the NHS on the grounds of being LGB contributes significantly to the scale of those estimated to be missing.

BME people, work and the NHS in Scotland - thousands missing from the payroll

The Equality & Human Rights Commission [EHRC] estimates that the average rate of employment for BME people across the public sector is 8%.

Scotland's NHS Boards recently published workforce profiling reports.  These are required in order to meet new specific equality duties, with the aim being that the Boards learn from analysing the data they gather and work out how to eliminate discrimination and improve employment chances for people who are recognised as being discriminated against - disabled people, black minority ethnic [BME] people, lesbian, gay & bisexual [LGB] people, and a number of other groups of people sharing what the law describes as 'protected characteristics'.

Research shows that 19 of Scotland's 22 NHS Boards published profiling reports.  The other 3 apparently decided to ignore the law.  No doubt the EHRC will be on their case.

From the reports which were published, we know that the NHS in Scotland employs 158,326 workers.  We also know that 4,164 of them identify themselves as BME - just 2.63% of the workforce.  Over 5% short of the average public sector employment rate for BME people.  

On the basis of these figures, there appears to be something like 8,500+ BME people missing from the payroll of Scotland's NHS.  

When an analysis of performance on race equality reveals that a town the size of Haddington would be needed to house all the BME people missing from the payroll of the NHS in Scotland, it is possible to conclude that institutional discrimination in the NHS on the grounds of race contributes significantly to the scale of those estimated to be missing.

Disability Equality is not working in the NHS

One of the clear measures of equality is to be found in the profile, by protected characteristic, of those in employment.

Being in employment can bring multiple, potentially positive, impacts on the lived experiences of many people who share particular protected characteristics.  It can reduce dependence on the less than generous state welfare system and the increasing stigma attached to what little support is provided to people who are jobless for whatever reason.  It provides the opportunities for those previously excluded from key areas of society to be able to influence change and the future shape of societal structures from within.  Being in work instead of being marginalised, excluded and discriminated against can also help start to slowly foster good relations between those who erect barriers and discriminate, and those who are discriminated against.

Scotland’s specific equality duties, adopted in May 2012, recognised this and set a clear goal for public bodies in Scotland.  Amongst other things, the duties required that public bodies gather data on their workforce by protected characteristic and use it to help them better perform their general equality duty to eliminate discrimination, advance equality of opportunity, and foster good relations.  April 30^th 2013 was the first date by which public bodies were required to publish a report on their efforts in meeting this particular part of the specific equality duties.

A recent research report into what workforce data has been published by the NHS in Scotland on disabled people shows that if the UK average of 13.1% of people in work being disabled were achieved by all Scotland's 22 NHS Boards, this would find 19,376 more disabled people working in the NHS.  This is roughly equivalent to the population of Bathgate and provides a graphic illustration of the number of disabled people missing from the payroll of the NHS.