Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities

Lord Dholakia Excerpts

Monday 21st March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for the Statement and give it a partial welcome, 12 years into this Government. A year ago, the independent Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities published its report, which within hours was unravelling. It has been discredited by many prominent experts and individuals.

As my honourable friend Taiwo Owatemi MP said in the Commons:

“If both the Sewell report and the strategy fail to identify the root causes of racial and ethnic disparities, how can either possibly hope to tackle them? That is why the strategy was always going to be hopelessly ineffective and short-sighted, and that is why it will fail to deliver for black, Asian and minority ethnic communities.”—[Official Report, Commons, 17/3/22; col. 1073.]


The answer that she received from the Minister there was that:

“A rhetorical trick is happening around this question.”—[Official Report, Commons, 17/3/22; col. 1075.]


Perhaps the Minister can explain why her Government find it so hard to accept that we still have a country where there clearly is discrimination and that racial disparities are the result of historic, endemic and still existing structural racism. Unless we accept that and build from that understanding, both individually and organisationally, we will not solve the terrible racial disparities, many of which are described in the original report.

Although I partially welcome this statement, it is based on the wrong premise. It has some good ideas but quite a few half-baked ones. Let us take employment, for example. It has failed completely to implement mandatory ethnicity pay-gap reporting, despite repeated calls from the CBI, the TUC and the Labour Party to do just that. Unlike with gender pay gaps, there is currently no legal requirement for UK businesses to disclose their ethnicity pay data. Will the UK Government follow the recent recommendation of the Women and Equalities Committee and introduce mandatory ethnicity pay-gap reporting by 2023, including urging employers to publish a supporting action plan?

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development has previously called for mandatory reporting, similar to the rules in place for the gender pay gap, to apply to all large employers. Commenting on the Government’s decision not to adopt mandatory reporting at this stage, Ben Willmott, head of public policy at the CIPD, said:

“The Government has missed an opportunity to tackle racial discrimination and inequality in the workplace by failing to introduce mandatory ethnicity pay reporting. Unfortunately, we know from previous schemes that a voluntary approach will not help drive the changes that are needed in many organisations.”


For example, if the pay gap is non-existent at entry level but significantly skewed at more senior levels, that can help inform the areas of focus. Employers might decide to, for example, invest in mentoring, with a focus on supporting particularly under-represented groups to progress, or in assessing the progression path to interrogate and root out baked-in bias. The TUC recently warned that insecure work is tightening the grip of structural racism in the labour market, with ethnic minority workers overrepresented on zero-hour contracts. Will the Minister urge the Government to introduce the long-awaited employment Bill to tackle zero-hour contracts?

Health, with a long section in the report, brings one of its major suggestions: for the establishment of an office for health disparities, to look into the issue and to work alongside the NHS to reduce differences in areas such as healthy life expectancy, and the propensity to develop some conditions. There are two issues regarding the NHS, and I declare an interest as a non-executive director of a health trust who has been on the workforce race equality course in the last month or so.

One issue is health inequalities, most starkly demonstrated in the pandemic in the unequal way that it affected and cost lives in our ethnic minority communities, but we know this to be the case over a whole range of health matters. How does the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities intend to change this? What levers will it pull to create the culture change and the investment change which will be necessary? The other issue is employment, concerning the treatment and promotion of ethnic minority employees in the NHS. White applicants are 1.6 times more likely to be appointed from shortlisting, compared with BME applicants. This figure has got worse in the last year or so.

BME staff are 1.6 times more likely to enter formal disciplinary process compared with white staff. The number of BME board members in trusts has increased —we should be very pleased about that. The workforce race equality indicators used in the NHS, which are very powerful tools indeed, will have a significant impact over a period of time. What they say relating to perceptions of discrimination, bullying, harassment and abuse—and on beliefs regarding equal opportunities in the workplace—is that they have not improved over time for BME staff.

It is astonishing that there is so little reference to policing in the Minister’s Statement. It was the actions of the police in the United States which sparked the protests here and led to the commissioning of the Sewell report. Trust and confidence in policing are absolutely fundamental to communities feeling safe and secure, and for addressing disadvantage and racial disparity in every other area of life. What action will the Minister take in the action plan to address a transformation in the culture of our policing which so desperately needs to address racial disparity? The report says that it wants to

“bridge divides and create partnerships between the police and communities”.

Will the Minister explain how she thinks that we can possibly bridge that divide when black schoolgirls are being strip-searched? Is she aware that this is not an isolated incident? The Metropolitan Police’s own figures show that, in 2021, 25 young people under 18 were strip-searched. Most were black or from other ethnic minorities. Some 60% were black, and only two of the 25 children were white.

The Conservative Government have had 12 years to act. Instead, they have failed to deliver and failed to acknowledge the genuine reasons for racial and ethnic disparities in Britain today. Britain and its communities deserve better.

[Lord Dholakia (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for this Statement. There is progress is some areas of disparities, while questions arise on other matters which need clarification. The first major question relates to the Covid pandemic and the Government’s disregard for the disproportional impact on ethnic minorities. Many workers have lost their lives. The pandemic showed how heavily we depend on our diverse communities to serve our NHS. Will the Minister commit to including the impact of the pandemic on ethnic disparity in the terms of reference for the Covid inquiry?

I had to enter a local hospital for a procedure recently, and throughout the seven days I was there I did not meet a single white person. All the services were provided by minorities from various parts of the world. How can we adequately thank them—instead of criticising their appearances as postboxes, as the Prime Minister once said? The actions set out by the government plan do not go nearly far enough to create a more inclusive society. They kick the can down the road on most issues with the creation of new strategies and frameworks in the years to come.

The new framework for stop and search will not build trust between the police and the ethnic communities they serve, unless they end suspicionless stop and search due to its disproportionate impact on minorities. On policing, I was shocked to hear from some crime commissioners that they do not intend to appoint additional police officers. Underrepresentation of police in recruitment, retention and promotion still remains a concern after over 50 years. This is not going to help the adversarial relations between the police and black communities. It is a shame on our police that a young, black student was stripped and searched intimately last week. How are the Government to put these matters right? The Government must be held to account for their actions.

It is worrying that the Government have set out an action plan to tackle inequality based on recommendations from a commission which concluded that there was no systemic racism in Britain. The Inclusive Britain strategy, published on Wednesday evening, was developed in response to a controversial report by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities last year. The commitments in the action plan include revamping the history curriculum for schoolchildren, a cash injection for school pupils who have fallen behind during the pandemic, and clamping down on online racist abuse through new legislation. On this, we do not need to look far: simply examine a football match on a Saturday afternoon to see how much we hate the extent of racism which is perpetrated on football grounds, and the action taken by many football players by taking the knee.

Moreover, I understand that the Department for Education will invest up to £75 million to deliver a state scholarship programme for students in higher education. The Government aim to improve maternal health outcomes for ethnic-minority women, a disparity which experts have linked to systematic racism. I trust that the Minister will have answers to some of these questions.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and Department for Work and Pensions (Baroness Stedman-Scott) (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, and the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, for the points they raised. I will try to deal with them as best as I can, one by one. I thank the noble Baroness for her limited support for the report. The report has, in many cases, gone down well. There are clearly things with which people do not agree, and we are listening to them. Should any noble Lord have anything which they would want to write to me about the report, I will give an undertaking to discuss it with the Minister in the other place, Kemi Badenoch, and get back to them.

The noble Baroness asked me about structural racism. I cannot rule out that some organisations in the UK may be institutionally racist. Of course, that is why we are funding the Equality and Human Rights Commission to strengthen its investigative work. I also believe that the term should be applied based on evidence. Often, the causes of racial disparity are complex, and not rooted in discrimination or prejudice. As the commission said, they did not find clear evidence for it in the areas it examined. This does not mean that people do not experience racism, but institutional racism is deeper, and we need evidence to say that it is there. I understand that there are structural reasons why some ethnic groups have better or worse outcomes than others. The new strategy aims to deal with those root causes.

The noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, raised the issue of the ethnicity pay gap. We are publishing guidance to employers on voluntary ethnicity pay reporting by summer 2022. No one should have to worry about why they are not being given the same opportunities as their colleagues. Ethnicity pay gap reporting is one of the tools which employers can use to build transparency and trust among their employees. It may not be the most appropriate tool for every type of employer seeking to ensure fairness in the workplace. It is also a complex measure and can be affected by many factors—meaning that it is easy for the data to be misinterpreted or misunderstood. We want to help those employers who want to use ethnicity pay gap reporting to ensure that their approach allows for meaningful comparisons to be made between employers. The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy has extensively consulted with experts and employers to identify these issues. We will be using this consultation, and robust evidence, to design a trustworthy reporting system which helps employers to identify causes of pay disparities. However, we reserve the right to introduce legislation at a future point, if and when the reporting tools are sufficiently developed, effective in driving positive change and accessible to more businesses.

The noble Baroness asked me why we had not mandated ethnicity pay reporting. A meaningful pay gap reporting standard for ethnicity will necessarily need to be very different from the one for gender reporting—which uses just two categories and we were discussing last week. We will not be legislating for mandatory reporting at this stage; rather, we will support employers with voluntary reporting. However, we reserve the right, as I have already said, to introduce legislation at a future time.

The noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, talked about the NHS Race and Health Observatory, which found widespread ethnic inequalities across a range of health services, with some communities found to have particularly poor access, experiences and outcomes. Why are the findings in our report so different? We welcome the NHS Race and Health Observatory’s examination of health disparities in the UK today. The Government are committed to reducing unacceptable disparities in health outcomes and experience of care, including by ethnicity, many of which have been further highlighted and exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic. The Department of Health and Social Care will publish a health disparities White Paper later this year, which will set out impactful measures to address ill health and health disparities, so that a person’s background does not dictate their prospects for a healthy life ahead of them.

We got to the point of asking about low trust in police among the ethnic minorities, particularly among young people. Recent events have raised serious issues with the police, and it is right that the Government ask those difficult questions to drive positive change. The Government, with policing partners, remain committed to driving forward good progress and improving trust in policing and crime. Our police are more diverse than ever before. Forces have worked hard to improve community engagement and we have seen major improvements in how the police deal with racist crimes, but we know that there is more to do. That is why attracting more officers from a wide range of ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds is a core ambition of our drive to recruit an extra 20,000 officers. The government response to CRED, along with wider activity being delivered across government and policing, remains vital to ensuring that we create safer streets and neighbourhoods for all our community. Our plan is to improve training to provide police officers with the practical skills that they need to interact with communities. That is a matter for the Home Office and, if there are any particular questions that noble Lords would like me to raise with the Home Office, I am happy to do so and report back.

Both the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, and the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, raised the issue of the outrageous case of a black 15 year-old Hackney schoolgirl who was strip-searched. I cannot comment on this case, as I am not familiar with its details, but it raises issues of serious concern, and I shall raise them with my ministerial colleagues in the Home Office and the Department for Education. I believe that there is an Urgent Question tomorrow, when noble Lords will have the opportunity to put their questions to my noble friend the Minister at the Home Office. Let me be absolutely clear: the behaviour of the police in this case was totally unacceptable. The Metropolitan Police apologised on Tuesday for the child’s truly regrettable treatment, and it is vital that the IOPC concludes its investigation into this case and that any findings are acted on swiftly.

The noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, raised the issue of the Government being committed to an inclusive Britain, when the powers of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill are used in a discriminatory manner against ethnic minorities. These powers are not discriminatory. When making use of public order powers, the police must ensure that their use is balanced, proportionate and in line with human rights and equalities legislation. Through their training, authorised professionals practise continuous personal development in the police to strive for their management of any protests getting the right balance. The Home Office, again, has conducted an overarching equalities impact assessment for the Bill to consider the impact the measures will have on those with particular protected characteristics.

The noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, raised the point about the impact of Covid-19 on ethnic minorities. On 3 December 2021, we published the final report to the Prime Minister on progress to address Covid-19 health disparities. The report summarises government work to address those disparities since the end of May 2021 and considers the Government’s overall approach to tackling Covid-19 disparities since the review commenced in June. Thanks to our award-winning analysis and new research, backed by more than £7 million in government funding, we now have a much better understanding of the factors that have driven the higher infection and mortality rates among ethnic minority groups. To reduce the health disparities we have seen during the pandemic, the Government will accept and implement the recommendations from the final Covid-19 disparities report.

Stop and search is one of the many vital tools used by the police. It is very important that it is used proportionately and not in any discriminatory way. The police will continue their training to understand how best to use that tool, which in some cases is quite appropriate.