Badenoch wants to bin the Public Sector Equality Duty

Good

So be it. She’s better than the others but if the public want Reform then what can one do.

My point is that she is not in a position to implement anything, not now and probably not in the future. She will be like Ed Davey. Their only hope is coalition.

It's not necessarily a simple left-versus-right shift. Some voters are reacting to what they perceive as unfairness or inconsistency in institutions, including policing and the implementation of equality policies.

Concerns about perceived two-tier policing, subjective enforcement of public order laws, and the way some public bodies apply the Equality Act and PSED may be influencing voter behaviour. The question is less about ideology and more about trust in institutions and whether people feel laws are being applied equally.

Ultimately, if Labour wants to counter the perception that is driving some voters towards parties such as Reform, it will need to focus on rebuilding trust in institutions. That means showing through actions rather than rhetoric that public institutions serve everyone fairly.

She’s right but Labour vote will likely continue to tank and people shift further right to Reform and Restore.

There is little point in debating with an opponent who has already stacked the deck.

The PSED is particularly vulnerable to subjectivity because its key terms are broad and open to interpretation rather than being defined by clear, measurable standards.

Public authorities are required to have "due regard" to advancing equality of opportunity and fostering good relations, but the law does not specify precisely what level of consideration is sufficient or what outcomes demonstrate compliance.

As a result, different officials can reach very different conclusions while all claiming to have fulfilled the duty. One authority may view targeted programmes for certain groups as necessary to advance equality, while another may see equal treatment of everyone as the correct approach. The absence of objective criteria leaves considerable room for personal judgment.

This subjectivity becomes particularly apparent in policy decisions involving competing priorities. For example, when allocating funding, designing public services, or conducting equality impact assessments, officials must often predict how different groups might be affected and decide which factors deserve the greatest weight. Concepts such as "fostering good relations" are especially difficult to measure objectively, allowing decision-makers to justify a wide range of policies based on their own interpretation of what promotes social cohesion.

This leads to inconsistent decision-making across public bodies and allows political or ideological preferences to influence outcomes under the broad umbrella of compliance with the PSED.

What would your solution be to address the ways that the act has been manipulated to give greater protection to some over others - thereby privileging certain groups?

We've even had total fabrications whereby the act was being wrongfully used to give males access to female only spaces, services and sports that they didn't actually have - and in a way whhich prioritised them over the actual group that 'single sex provisions' were meant to protect?

Badenoch is right in questioning the efficacy of the Equality Act.

Following on from my last post where I said that the wording of the Act currently makes it too easy for public bodies to interpret it in line with their own subjective beliefs. Cases such as Forstater, Bailey and Peggy etc indicate that tribunals have increasingly had to remind institutions that protected beliefs cannot be treated as misconduct merely because others find them offensive.

I agree with Badenoch ⬆️

Luckily talk like this isn't putting women off voting for the Tories or Reform. Imagine if it did.

"Badenoch said the Tories would scrap the public sector equality duty (PSED), which is a legal requirement under the act that compels all public bodies to carry out detailed assessments of how their functions affect people with different protected characteristics. Badenoch, who served as equalities minister in the last Conservative government, will say that the legal obligation has fuelled “identity politics” and an obsession with diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) policies to spread across public services.

The Conservatives argue that “box-ticking” requirements to comply with “ideological schemes” have led workers in core public services, including police officers, NHS staff and teachers, to become distracted from their jobs.
Badenoch will blame the PSED for creating “tribal politics” and will pledge to “restore common sense across public life by ensuring every citizen is treated equally under the law”.

Labour introduced the Equality Act to protect people from discrimination based on a list of nine protected characteristics: race, religion, disability, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender reassignment, marriage and pregnancy. Badenoch will warn that those principles are being eroded by “expansive use” of the act and by activists who have hijacked its “open-ended requirements”. "

No, but she can still contribute to the wider debate in a meaningful and purposeful way. Countering the blunt instrument style of Reform.

No she isn't! what she wants to do is keep to the original spirit of the Equalities Act which was to provide a buffer and some security against negative discrimination, but take measures to prevent it being use as a tool of social engineering and political manipulation.

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/kemi-badenoch-speech-equality-act-identity-politics-zcf9knk3d

The Equality Act is absolutely needed for protections against genuine discrimination, but I do think parts of it have drifted too far toward subjective perception rather than objective evidence.

The clearest example is harassment under s.26. The law says conduct can count as harassment if it has the “effect” of creating an offensive or humiliating environment, taking into account the complainant’s perception, the circumstances, and whether it was reasonable for it to have that effect. In theory that last bit is the safeguard, the “reasonable person” test, the old “man on the Clapham omnibus” idea. In practice though, employers and institutions are often so terrified of complaints that perception starts driving the process long before any proper objective analysis happens.

So you end up with situations where subjective offence is treated almost as proof, intent becomes largely irrelevant, ordinary disagreement gets escalated, and people start self-censoring because nobody really knows where the line is anymore.

I think the Act could be improved without weakening protections for real discrimination. Personally I’d amend it so tribunals had to apply a much clearer objective standards, something more like “would a reasonable person of ordinary resilience consider this seriously degrading, hostile or discriminatory?” rather than simply accepting that somebody felt offended.

The irony is that if the law becomes too subjective, public confidence in equality protections starts eroding altogether, which ultimately helps nobody.

A review is long overdue. As usual good intentions have been reduced to box ticking bureaucracy and the empowering of certain vested interests via staff groups and outsourcing to other organisations like Stonewall, Athena Swan etc. includingbadly designed equality training.
It was supposed to be about embedding equality into the whole planning and management systems, it's failed. The elderly and the disabled are still at the bottom of the list.
Initiatives like blind shortlisting of job application is useful and practical. Suggestions that everyone declare their pronouns are not.

Just wanted to comment that a white working class boy has at least two protected characteristics, his sex, and his race.

A white personal may use the PC of race to complain about not having the same or equal treatment compared to another racial group.

The problem is public bodies appear to have organised PC’s in to hierarchies, and being a “minority” group gets extra points. Both with race and then with “gender” with woolly evidence of what the they want to do and what they want to achieve.

I'm still on the first page of this thread. It all depends on what your settings are.

No idea why you liking paperwork is important but the point isn't just to produce more paperwork for admins to file, but to assess risk and mitigate. All the men in female everythings has been done whilst this policy is in existence, so again, what was the point of it?

I think the issue is also 'can't see the wood for the trees' so if you have umpteen processes, policies, and impact assessments it's actually quite easy to do what the NHS has done and have absolutely ridiculously poor examples of all of these that no-one will ever look at. Resulting in real harms.

I used to work in the public sector, and am now private sector. At one point in my public sector job they created a whole new department C (communications) in order to carry messages between department A (frontline delivery) and B (high level policy and senior managers). It was a predictable shitshow which removed accountability and didn't make anything better. I have no idea why they did it as there was no problem when B spoke directly to A, except for possibly senior managers getting a more blunt assessment of reality than they liked (oh wait....)

By way of explanation….. In the abstract, this duty seems as if it would make a public service more considered in serving the public, but unfortunately “equality” has been co-opted (equality of treatment or of outcome?) and it is time to rethink as to what this duty really adds.

I think that the public sector is always going to have a bit of an issue with equality arguments, because resources are finite even if aims are infinite - once you say “we need to do more for social care” then you are potentially putting that above other things you could be funding for other disadvantaged groups and pitting one disadvantaged group over another constantly to make decisions is not a good way to do things. I feel as if this is sort of where we are now - having efficient public services and trying to engineer social justice are not always going to pull in the same direction. Elected politicians and accountable public servants should be making decisions, not outsourcing to diversity consultants.

It would be interesting to hear where people think it has been actually effective and caused good things to happen, as opposed to tying things up. It has dismally failed in some areas - the figures show that black women are still disadvantaged in maternity care in the U.K.
and there has been a lack of curiosity in terms of tailoring care outcomes to them, despite the U.K. having in theory the potential to collect large scale data to inform experiences. The public sector equality agenda hasn’t exactly been amazing at making that happen - in fact, not at all helpful. What has been helpful is public campaigns and bad press… The issue with the “public sector duty”/“diversity” agenda is that you can only fix what you see and what you can actually change, so the duty to promote equality becomes the duty to do what particular special interest lobby groups tell you to do, whether or not it really fixes the root of the issue. Which is not ok.

Personally, I’d prefer a duty to run efficient public services that can be accessed by everyone (which is achieved by the discrimination provisions of the act) rather than imposing a wooly equality agenda.

i don’t think it is ok for a public sector diversity agenda to dictate, for example, that we will only hire one type of candidate going forward to ensure that our workforce is diverse, but I am very happy for them to choose the more disadvantaged candidate who has been assessed as having equal ability in a competitive process, as the equality act allows them to.

I thought there were several interesting posts on the first page of this thread.

I'm an administrator. I like paperwork. When people casually propose scrapping processes/rules my boring logistical brain starts thinking where the mess is going to be further down the line. Because someone with a low-paid unglamorous job always has to sort it out glib knee-jerk decisions.

I think it’s quite a good plan actually - at least insofar as we can now discuss the extent to which it genuinely does something good.