Who can't handle the truth .... on equality ?

In my search to find out why Visit Scotland only employs one worker [out of 763] confident enough to identify as Catholic, I have uncovered what appears to be a stunning disregard for the truth.

From my previous blog on this subject, readers will know that the Chief Executive of Visit Scotland, Malcolm Roughead, offered what appeared to be cast iron assurances that Visit Scotland was compliant with the law on equality.  To quote from the Visit Scotland response :

"I have referred your letter to my colleague Chris McCoy, our Equality & Diversity manager, who informs me that she has had confirmation from the Equality & Human Rights Commission [EHRC] who are fully supportive of our Equality Mainstreaming Report & Objective and are content that we are complying with the legislation as it stands."

Since that response and because of the unsatisfactory nature of it, I referred my concerns to the EHRC in Scotland and, amongst other matters, asked :

Can you please advise if the EHRC is advising public bodies generally on whether or not they are compliant in relation to the general and specific equality duties, or only in response to specific requests from organisations ?

The response from the EHRC flashed me back to the early 90's when Jack Nicholson chomped his way through the scenery of the film 'A Few Good Men' and blistered that killer phrase into film history :

"You want the truth ?  You can't handle the truth."

The response from the EHRC as to whether they were handing out gold stars of compliance with the specific duties to our public bodies ? :

"On your final question, the Commission has not been in touch with any organisation to state that they are compliant."

I have now asked Visit Scotland to provide a copy of the evidence it has that the EHRC confirms Visit Scotland is compliant with the legislation.

I do believe we, the citizens of Scotland, can handle the truth on whether or not our public bodies are compliant with the law on equality.

Visit Scotland ..... then again, maybe not if you are a Catholic ?

VisitScotland has an odd take on equality.

Not so long ago, when creating a campaign in support of that infamous 21st century reprise of Brigadoon, otherwise known as the Homecoming in 2009, Visit Scotland were caught out portraying Scotland as a whites-only country.  When this was pointed out to them, they barely blushed before reaching for the air-brush and adding a token BME face to their poster campaign.  

Just 4 years on, Visit Scotland published a number of reports required to show how it was meeting the specific equality duties, which help guide public bodies towards eliminating discrimination.  One of the duties is to do with discrimination in the workplace and requires public bodies to gather data on the profile of people who work for it, using identifiers [known as protected characteristics] such as gender, race, religion and others.  The public bodies are then required to show how they have used the data gathered to better meet their general equality duty - in other words, they need to work out what the data tells them about discrimination through, say, not employing any or enough BME people and setting out plans to remedy the shortfall and so eliminate discrimination.  Simple.

Not, it appears, for Visit Scotland.

Employing 763 staff, you would expect them to publish around 10 pages of a report which would provide details, in numbers and pictures, on who works for Visit Scotland in terms of protected characteristic.  Some of the pages would set out an analysis of where Visit Scotland thinks discrimination may be the cause of some protected characteristics being missing from or under-represented on the payroll.  Some pages might even offer evidence of how good an employer Visit Scotland is in terms of, say, the number of disabled people employed.  Maybe even a couple of paragraphs at the end setting out an action plan to eliminate any discrimination the figures showed could exist ?

Here is the Visit Scotland report.
Read it and weep for equality.

Here is the Visit Scotland report.  Read it and weep for equality.

I contacted Visit Scotland, wondering if the data showing they employed just 1 Catholic might be evidence of sectarianism, and wondering that their ever-so-brief report might be non-compliant with the specific equality duties.  Their response - a serious case of corporate denial - serves simply to confirm that Scotland struggles to accept that sectarianism exists, or that anyone outside of Glasgow football clubs needs to take action to eliminate it.  

I have passed all of this over the the Equality & Human Rights Commission in Scotland and asked them to investigate.  I will also pass it on to the government minister responsible for Visit Scotland.  If you want to world to have a non-airbrushed picture of Scotland and want Scotland to welcome people here, irrespective of their religious belief, you might want to be asking Malcolm Roughead, Chief Executive of Visit Scotland, just why only 1 Catholic works for the organisation and why he cannot see that this might be as a result of discrimination against Catholics.

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.