Badenoch wants to bin the Public Sector Equality Duty

[Slothtoes]

Badenoch wants to bin the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED) because she wants to ‘bring back trust in public institutions’. She will replace it with ‘common sense’.
That’s always worked out so well for women...

She says everyone should be treated equally. Just talking now on Radio 4 Today programme.
Badenoch is trying to chuck the baby out with the bathwater in a very dim-witted dangerous way.

Exactly. It is very malleable, PSED. Assuming it’s a loss of protection is wrong.

I like a lot of what Badenoch says, but when she comes out with something stupid, it's really fucking stupid.

Justin Webb probably not alone in not understanding protected characteristics by talking about white working class boys needing help. Badenoch could have made more of the fact that they are not covered by the PCs of the Equality act.

I agree it would be ideal if training was accurate and not driven by activists and if there was any regulation, but I suspect the latter is going to be hampered by the fact the economic situation is just so crap and the country has no money and there are so many activists in positions of power in the NHS and elsewhere, they're not going to give up easily. Having real accountability for not doing your job properly seems easier.

Although maybe they could scrap the DEI jobs within the public sector and use that money to fund proper regulation instead.

And yes, whilst it's great there are legal routes, most people don't have the time or money to take them. Especially working class women.

I just watched the WRN interview of the Darlington nurses - they specifically commented on how the foreign born nurses felt they couldn't pursue legal action as were scared of having their NHS sponsored visas cancelled. This point was raised on here during the NHS audit - how many trusts were promoting their moral superiority policy of bringing in foreign HCPs, putting them up in accommodation and sponsoring their visas (and thereby denying them full freedom as their accommodation and jobs are contingent upon them staying siilent about abuses like men in women's spaces).

Edited to add: the bullying the Darlington nurses has received from management is quite jaw dropping. There is no way I'd trust those managers not to find a spurious reason to fire someone or try and revoke their visa. Or they could just let the visa lapse, presumably, if ideological compliance is not fervent enough.

The principles underlying PSED are great. Based on the NHS audit we did the practice is woeful. We looked at around 100 EqIAs and none of them were done properly (or achieved what they should have). Even the very small number that identified that allowing men into women’s spaces may cause a detriment to women and people with some beliefs/religions, these detriments were handwaved away rather than mitigated.

We may be beyond “training” to stop EqIAs being a tick box exercise to rubber stamp whatever policy has already been decided.

However, we need the principles to become practice more than ever IMO.

Comonsense won’t cut it.

There are lots and lots of groups who don't have protection but arguably, morally, should have and lots of groups who DO have protection but they might as well not have given all the (lack of) effort made to ensure they're not discriminated against. Implementation of the EA2010 seems insanely discriminatory and biased, in general.

And some PCs require discrimination to not cause harm e.g. age - the same treatment for a child and and adult would be arguable discriminatory to the child. Obviously there are other laws that cover this, but for some reason the EA2010 seems to take precedence in public discourse. Which it shouldn't e.g. safeguarding law for children should take precedence over EA2010 at the very least. It's a bit ridiculous the argument is always around the EA2010 and not the workplace regs around changing rooms, too. It seems to me that there are lots of lawyers who understand the EA2010 but not how it interacts with other laws, presumably as the former is more profitable.

I'm afraid my opinion of lawyers as generally intelligent has taken a bit of a nosedive after Judge Kemp's made up law and other events.

Obviously there are some seriously impressive barristers and lawyers, NC, BC, AR etc but it's now evidence-based on an individual level for me - no more 'oh they must know what they're doing because they're a Judge / lawyer'.

Can you explain why you think it is really fucking stupid.

What actual benefits have come from doing this to say, women or people with disabilities?

I think she sometimes makes knee-jerk responses to issues with a view to sounding more glibly no-nonsense/anti-woke than Reform. In this case there seems to be more nuance and background to consider.

She can articulate some issues really well, so I find her inconsistent. It would be interesting to have seen her as leader at another point in history. Reform are setting all agendas at the moment.

I think shes tapping into a feeling with the electorate.

We pay a lot of taxes, but the quality of services is poor. And the same providers who aren't achieving congratulate themselves on their diversity initiatives.

It's not unreasonable for the public to assume, rightly or wrongly, that they are employing diversity hires instead of competent workers, or are focused on DEI instead of doing their job.

This isn't the same as protecting the workforce, I think its disingenuous to say otherwise.

I don't have Badenoch confidence that we can rely on their 'common sense' though.

That has all happened - and is still happening - despite the so called Equality Act.

Surely the public sector is exactly as obliged as everyone else (whether individuals or institutions) to obey the law. The PSED is an expression of that, and EIAs are a tool for doing it.

EIAs are done badly because some PCs are ignored. They should sack HR/DEI 'specialists' and employ litigation-averse lawyers instead.

The assumption its removal would be a problem for public authorities is wrong. They would probably be content.

Badenoch has not really thought this through entirely, because it is not a panacea for issues identified by the right due to equality legislation or DEI. The reality is that any government who wanted to make preferential legislation can already, and PSED is a nominal hurdle they have to meet (and one that they are largely able to meet because they have the information).

What happens if you remove PSED? Any government, of any complexion has a slightly freer hand to legislate, but now it does not need to meet this duty. It still has to consider the Equality Act. And so the duty is really there to provide a defence against litigation, to show consideration and compliance, and little else. A government that was really minded to deliver its policy would just have something less to do. And it wanted to defend against judicial review, it could address in other ways,

A red herring.

Well what nuance and background should be considered, bearing in mind many Equality Assessments just say - 'no problem' and carry on doing what they want?

The public sector has ground to a halt because it's been buried under so many policies and procedures. A massive amount of that burden needs to be lifted so the public sector can deliver the service to the public that it's supposed to.
I'm glad Kemi is starting a conversation about it, we can't have an effective and streamline delivery of services until the public sector is striped of its unnecessary burden.

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.

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.

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.

Badenoch needs to look into Chesterton’s Fence. Why does she think PSED was needed in the first place for EqA…?

We all know that even with PSED as established law, decisions by loads of public bodies haven't had enough regard for EqA or have just ignores it.

PSED is about much more than just filling out impact assessment forms,. It’s there to prompt PBs to prompt their own thinking about EqA. Firstly internally and then publicly if necessary, to show their rationale for their decisions.

PSED is supposed to embed the principles of the EqA into all of the thinking of PBs. That’s a very good thing. PSED definitely needs carrots and sticks, training and PB cultural change to make it work, and maybe greater regulatory oversight from EHRC to make it harder for PBs to make poor decisions. But not being thrown out in favour of ‘common sense’.

We need the legal checks and balances like the PSED more than ever as some PB’s budgets have remained slashed since austerity.

Thinking that public bodies should just be able to make decisions based on their own interpretations of the EqA is a real luxury belief. Surely it’s only a very privileged person who does not rely on the NHS, state schools, local authorities, who’s had no contact with the police or criminal justice system, has no contact with social services , has no immigration issues to think of etc, who would consider it better to remove a system of accountability put there to protect people.

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....)

100% this

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?

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.

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.

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.

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