How much has Stonewall cost our local councils?

[HagoftheNorth]

Jeremy Hunt says councils should stop spending money on DEI activities. Many, if not most councils seem to be making (or have recently made) annual payments of £2500 to be members of Stonewall’s scheme. Of course, having joined, they’d then need to commit resources to identifying and implementing changes which Stonewall require, and that may well involve employing Stonewall approved consultants….

The Local Government Association says that councils spend ‘pence’ on this. I’d love to know how many ‘pence’ our, ‘almost bankrupt’ councils have spent on this nonsense

There’s plenty of FOIs on Whatdotheyknow.com Councils about their spend on Stonewall. It’s pretty disgusting of local government to be spending public money on Stonewall when they don’t have enough money to spend on basic functions.

I'm afraid I agree with the LGA, the cost of these consultancies or whatever they are is utterly trivial compared to local government budgets, it's just a cheap point for Hunt. The advice they give is crap clearly and that's why LAs shouldn't pay for it, but its not a financial consideration

Still every penny counts aa does the number of employee hours spent on EDI stuff. In these times it’s a luxury, especially when a few thousand could be all that’s needed in council grant to a local voluntary organisation that actually supports a group doing something vital. When my local council was doing it’s budget, the cuts were 5k here, 2k there

Yeah this. The fact that stonewall give shit advice & TRA have been allowed to run riot in some places doesn't mean that there isn’t a need for better EDI considerations eg how do we make services better for people with disabilities? How do we properly support carers? How do we ensure ageism isn’t built into services?

the problem is that local authorities have ignored the more difficult and therefore expensive equality & diversity issues by popping pronouns in emails & painting rainbows everywhere

its Just political point scoring

Stonewall's income from the Public Sector is recorded in their accounts.

What is NOT recorded is the cost in legal fees of the tribunals and claims and settlements arising from "Stonewall Law" being applied.

It would also be interesting to know how much is spent on trying to get Stonewall points

• lanyards, badges, murals, road pain, signage

As well as the wages cost of a self perpetuating exponentially increasing number of staff
NONE of whom are delivering front line services

This really fucked me off for a number of reasons;

1. my LA has spent as near as zero for everything, even stuff we should have spent money on - for two decades. This is what got us into the virtue signalling mess in the first place.

2. diverting attention to EDI and framing it as a waste of money is a terrible move - because councils need training on Equality Diversity and Inclusion, or we risk failing very vulnerable people, very publicly and nastily in our public duties - see rotheram.

3. stonewall haven't been involved in LA training since procurement and legal saw which way the sewage plume was blowing.

This is just feeding into the typical lazy narrative of councils misusing public funds, rather than the systematic underfunding of public services.

EDI has not stopped things like Rotherham.
If anything it made it worse.

Councils started being capped in 2010 (thank you Eric Pickles)
THAT is the reason they are all broke - of every political hue
BUT
some have focussed their resources better than others

those that did not play the Stonewall / Gendered Intelligence games have generally coped better

I was in Cardiff the other weekend I noticed a progress flag painted on the road outside the castle. A few yards up there was a crossing and the road there was a mess of potholes and patches on patches. I suspect that as the flag will have needed several bespoke colours it will have been relatively expensive.

less than 0.2% of Birminghams budget, according to the BBC just now

The direct cost is trivial

the diverted resource and "on cost" is not.

I’d argue that £2500 annually of public money to provide partial and incorrect guidance to local authorities is a shocking waste of money. What about all the man/woman hours it takes to complete their stupid annual surveys and returns. It all adds up.

... And yet children's homes contracts not worth reporting on - presumably peers are making money on that budget line..

@Timeforabiscuit
If gender ideology was kicked out of councils and Safeguarding came back to the fore, better childrens homes contracts would follow

@Talkinpeace you honestly think diverting a councils existing 0.6 WTE from EDI to safeguarding will sort that out? If you do, I think a number of transformation roles are calling your name 😄!

Isn’t the point about value for money rather than the percentage of Council’s overall budget? All public bodies should have robust controls on their expenditure whether it’s £2.50, £2500 or £250,000.

Both can be true. The people hours across a whole LA spent on this nonsense is massive. From all the training sessions, resources, meetings at all levels in numerous teams, written proposals, negotiations, tendering for work just to paint an illegal and dangerous rainbow crossing. Multiply that across lots of departments for a variety of initiatives and it's significant.
Forcing employees to adopt the incoherent trans ideology with a language that upends reality along with actions that actively harm women and children in particular, doesn't come easily. It requires many levels of coercion and intimidation to enforce it in an LA.
And that takes power and time - all of which costs.

This. Also, many a mickle maks a muckle.

I'm sorry but the cost is not just the consultancy fee. It is the ongoing cost of rewriting policies sending staff on training employing managers to make sure the equality and diversity straightjackets are being properly adhered to.
The cost goes on and on and on and on

Exactly. It's not just the surface cost.

Not to mention in this county we've got pot holes everywhere, kids with special needs not getting the support they need because apparently there's no money, half the street lights are out... £2500 could be going on something far more practically worthwhile. This fur coat and no knickers bullshit has to stop.

Wish there was some way of putting the amount of effort and expenditure expended on trans-focused EDI on the EDI that is needed and more problematic to deliver. But at least this is less money spent on the wrong things in the meantime, so less damage that will need to be rectified?

Plus I love the idea of Stonewall contracts being cancelled and the decision having to be made anew about spending that money on that service in the future. Think that the decisions would be different.

It may not be much money as a percentage of a council’s budget but even £2.5k could make a real difference to plenty of underfunded organisations that make every penny work really hard.

I don't like the fact that EDI matters are so often focused on gender identity to the exclusion of almost everything else. There are so many underrepresented communities who struggle to access services and they don't have a Stonewall equivalent to help them be seen.