WEC to question the EHRC Chair and Chief Executive 11 June 2025 2:20pm

[IwantToRetire]

The Women and Equalities Committee (WEC) will question the Chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Baroness Falkner of Margravine in Parliament on Wednesday, 11 June during its annual scrutiny session of the EHRC.

Venue: The Thatcher Room, Portcullis House
Watch live: Visit parliamentlive.tv Women and Equalities Committee

The Women and Equalities Committee (WEC) will question the Chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Baroness Falkner of Margravine in Parliament on Wednesday, 11 June during its annual scrutiny session of the EHRC.

MPs on the cross-party committee, chaired by Labour MP Sarah Owen, will discuss the EHRC’s work and resources and wider equalities policy, including the implications of the For Women Scotland Supreme Court judgment and the EHRC’s subsequent consultation on the Code of Practice.

The Committee will hear from the EHRC’s Chief Executive, John Kirkpatrick, alongside Baroness Falkner.

Witnesses
Starting at 2.20pm
Baroness Kishwer Falkner of Margravine, Chair, Equality and Human Rights Commission
John Kirkpatrick, Chief Executive, Equality and Human Rights Commission

https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/328/women-and-equalities-committee/news/207403/wec-to-question-the-ehrc-chair-and-chief-executive/

(I came across this by chance whilst looking for a date for the WEC interview with Mary-Ann Stephenson but could find nothing - anybody know when it will be.)

I’m not sure the GC groups never pointed out that men without GRCs don’t legally count as women. Dr Nic Williams for FPFW made this point very early on.

I think the reason it hasn’t been made by GC lawyers is that most of these cases up to this point have centred on belief.

The WESC have hightlighted potential conflicts in law, but are blaming the EHRC, rather than parliament.

Someone on the committee used the 30 years stealth trans person as an example. To comply with the law, they would have to inform their employer that they had a GRC, changed their documents and were not the sex they present as. The implication being does that conflict with their privacy? Is it written into the law that a person with a GRC does not have to declare they have one, and are using their changed documents as orginal.

I think we need the SC to rule about what is written in the GRA, too. But i doubt any TRA would want to risk that.

We certainly knew they weren't legally female, but were pushing themselves in under the cover of non-gender reassignment discrimination (disadvantaged relative to everyone, but with different comparators from GRC-holders). But did we know that their presence was totally breaking the basis for the SSEs? Or was it one of those 'we don’t know who has a GRC' situations?

All water under the bridge now, but TRAs will carry on arguing that the SSEs can still be respected by allowing in opposite-sex trans as well as babes-in-arms, cleaners, etc 🙄. A PP has already pointed out that SC's observations about SSE operation are Obiter.

The thing about the CEOs is fairly simple. There has to be an accounting officer to make sure that any spend is regular. In a Whitehall department it's the Permanent Secretary, in a body like the EHRC it's the CEO.

Therefore it's not a role that can lie vacant for weeks or months at a time. You see this all the time in Whitehall. Jack is retiring as Perm Sec of a department, Joanna is lined up to replace him, but Joanna needs to tidy up loose ends at her current job and can't start immediately. So Dave gets to be Perm Sec on an interim basis to cover the six weeks until Joanna starts.

Three substantive CEOs in five years isn't an unreasonable turnover, especially if one of them departed unexpectedly. Adding in the short term interims and presenting it as six CEOs in five years, with the impression that Falkner is a nightmare boss who nobody can work for...

MPs should know how this works, and if they're pretending otherwise, they're either being stupid or dishonest.

What is the legal basis for single sex women’s groups/facilities/protections with some men in them? They aren’t single sex. Yes, TRAs will continue to argue self serving nonsense, as they have always done. But the EHRC can clarify and hopefully there will be case law on this point in future.

These MPs are both stupid and dishonest, so that tracks.

She challenged them on including the interim CEOs in that as they were just stepping up to a role and didn’t expect to do it permanently.

And yes I think a large part of it was the “we don’t know who has a GRC so we have to let all of these men in” which has now been thrown out. Having a GRC isn’t a pass to women’s spaces.

I guessing the interim CEOs were not getting the same salary as a full time CEO?

I don’t know but it was disingenuous to include them as “CEOs” as pp said.

Agreed - a pathetic attempt at undermining the EHRC Chair

I assume they were, but on a short term basis. It really is just a matter of needing someone in the role at all times for accounting officer purposes and having a functioning chain of command, and with this sort of senior recruitment, even if the incumbent doesn't leave suddenly there's likely to be an interregnum.

So it will have been exactly as Falkner said, the new CEO doesn't arrive for several weeks so we need someone to step up.

There's a similar thing in the US when a new president comes in and nominates his cabinet. So there's a nominee for Treasury Secretary or whatever, but in the interim days or weeks before the Senate confirms the nominee, a Treasury official will fill the role, because you need someone who can sign things off. Only an extreme pedant would class those interim office holders as cabinet members.

This isn't some obscure thing that MPs couldn't be expected to be aware of. So counting the interim CEOs to demonstrate some supposedly outrageous turnover of leadership is... let's just say disingenuous.

Welcome @BlueLegume to one of the few places where we can have sane discussions about the insanity of where the world has got to and express truthful facts about reality without being branded transphobic (except perhaps by the drive-by scolders, who don’t like women to have opinions that have not been approved by men). It is hard to believe that educated and otherwise intelligent people can be so taken in by the loud TRAs, but that seems to be the case - as the WEC hearing demonstrates. I don’t think you are wrong about transwomen dominating the debate and transmen rarely get a look in. I wonder why that might be the case? It just underlines that trans ideology is a men’s supremacist movement.

@AlexandraLeaving many thanks for the welcome. I am particularly interested in educating myself more as sadly one of my adult children - gorgeous, intelligent, funny - has been utterly brainwashed by the TRA movement. She is a lovely person, she knows we are very inclusive and always have been as parents of culture, sexuality etc etc very much about looking at the ‘person’ and how they behave - be kind was our mantra way before it became a hashtag. We literally cannot have a conversation about this whole subject without her accusing us of being bigoted. So I have backed off even trying BUT it is so sad to see how they have got under her skin. I am hoping that some of the current discussions may get her to see that wanting women’s right to mean real women that we are in no way bigoted -but I guess you cannot put an old head on young and impressionable shoulders. Will continue to watch with interest. Yesterday Sarah Owen was appalling. I certainly did not feel she was on the side of biological women. Simply ensuring the TRAs got the message ‘she had their backs’.

@BlueLegume I am sorry you are in that position. I think there are many regular posters here in a similar boat, and there is lots that can be learnt and solidarity gained from the threads on this board. Hope you stick around.

@BlueLegume definitely sticking around. Our situation isn’t too awful it is just sad that we now have this huge elephant in the room we cannot discuss and as a family we have always been very open to discussing lots of topics and understanding each others views. She is literally blinded by the TRA narrative and furious at the SC ruling. I like my kids having different opinions to me and vice versa - this is a huge sticking point. As I said before I can respect her views on this - the issue is she cannot appreciate ours back without accusing us of being transphobic. Daftest thing is my partner and I have clocked up over 10 MtF trans colleagues over the past 30 years and just got on with it. Partner has just had another male on his team announce he is now called Hermione* - well another female name - you get the gist. Our daughter has never encountered any.

I just used the one on the Women and Equalities web page. https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/328/women-and-equalities-committee/

Made it clear i wanted to know how to make a complaint and who would be the contact.

I suspect it means some poor admin staff will now face a "sotnewall" in terms of getting anyone senior to explain how a complaint might be made.

I suppose the other root is that the Committees are a function of the House of Commons and complain to whoever is in charge of making sure that works effectively.

But I think this came up on another thread and it didn't seem clear who or which department that might be.

The Speaker?

Thanks. Will make time to read later tonight.

Thank you so much for explaining and putting together the links. No time to read in full now, but really interested to know which law was broken!

Just to go over the history of how women only was made by Labour's EA to be able to mean biological women and trans women as well as only biological women. Never forget this was the aim of Labour.

As written and interpreted women only could mean women and trans women, and where "proportionate" only biological women. This was because practitioners and later courts accepted that men with a GRC were "Legal Women". (*)

Most people suspect that this was a trojan horse because in the future Labour would change the protected characteristic of gender reassignment to be not a medical route but just self id.

The Surpeme Court in ruling that the word woman in the EA can only refer to a biological female,which under mines the verbal trickery that those who drafted the EA thought they had got away with.

And is why the only people directly impacted by the Court ruling are those with a GRC. (less than 10,000)

But what nobody, including the WEC yesterday want to talk about is all those who were taken in, encouraged by Stonewall to think that self identifying, being gender fluid were part of the very limited number of people covered by the protected characteristic of gender reassignment.

--
(*) One of the problems with the way the EA was worded meant when advertising jobs etc., instead of being able to say in day to day words eg only biological women you had to quote the relevant section of the EA. I think but dont take this as absolute fact that you could either say:

1. Exempt under the Equality Act 2010, Schedule 9, and Part 1. Section 7(2) e of the Sex Discrimination Act 1975.

2. Exempt under the Equality Act 2010, Schedule 9.

1 = biological women only
2 = biological women and trans women

So 2 can no longer be used because the Supreme Court ruling has said woman is about biological sex and it was discriminatory against the protected characteristic of sex. No other protected characteristic can have its intregal fact appropriated by someone with a certificate.

But leaving aside those who went out of the way to say TWAW (ERCC etc.) it is hardly surprising some got it wrong. ie the law was badly written (some might say deliberately, I couldn't possibly comment).
And why Kemi Badenoch asked the EHRC to write something more user friendly to explain the contradiction.

This led to the EHRC basically saying the impact of the GRA on the EA meant this couldn't be done logically so it should be disapplied! I think this as much as the later Interim Guidelines is what has made Labour TRAs so angry with her. Because she summarised, made clear, Labour's original duplicitous intention to undermine the meaning of the word sex. (Thanks to the teaching of queer politics in universities etc..)

You say it was previously misinterpreted, but it’s clear from the explanatory notes that the previous interpretation was the one intended by the government when introducing the Act

.. but it’s clear from the explanatory notes that the previous interpretation was the one intended by the government when introducing the Act

Please reference the parts of the documents that you are claiming indicate this and what you think they mean - it's difficult to comment without this information

I forget whether I already said this, but....

They fucked up. The court was not obliged to take into account what they 'really wanted', only what the Act says, when interpreted in light of all available evidence. The Act has an existence independent of its creators, like Frankenstein's monster, in other words.

Here you go:

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/notes/division/3/16/20/7/5/3

Makes it clear male transsexuals are allowed in women-only groups, but exclusion can sometimes be merited.