Race Disparity Audit

Baroness Hussein-Ece Excerpts

Tuesday 10th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham]

I applaud the work that the noble Baroness has done over many years in the field of promoting better community relationships. One thing this audit does is to demolish the myth of white superiority. According to the indicators, white children leaving school do much worse than particular ethnic minority groups. As I said in the Statement, white children are more prone to smoke than children from other ethnic minorities. It helps to identify those areas in which ethnic minorities are outperforming the white British. If I refer to black people, that is the language used in the report, on the website and in the Statement. But I hope that when the noble Baroness has an opportunity to look at the website, she will find that some of her fears about promoting white superiority are allayed.

[Baroness Hussein-Ece (LD)]

The race disparity audit is very welcome. I have worked in the race equality field since the mid-1980s, and I was a commissioner on the Equality and Human Rights Commission when the report to which the Minister referred about how fair Britain is came out some years ago. It is depressing that there are still areas that have not improved, through discrimination, poverty or class—through a variety of factors. It cannot be right that black and ethnic minority children are more likely to be excluded and are less likely to go to a decent university; they are more likely to end up in prison, and they also, perhaps, may have to change their names on their CV to get an interview. Lots of research has been done; those are the stubborn areas that we need to tackle.

A lot of this is new, but an awful lot of it is not and has been around for many years—we have been talking about it for many years. Will the Government undertake to have a coherent race equality strategy which, as my noble friend Lady Burt said earlier, is cross departmental, and whereby Secretaries of State have responsibility in their own departments to tackle this issue and make a difference?

[Lord Young of Cookham]

I agree with much of what the noble Baroness has just said. If one looks at excluded children, which I did this morning, one sees that those most likely to be excluded are Traveller children and those in the Roma community. Publishing the figures highlights the fact that those children are more likely to be excluded. The noble Baroness is right that there are substantial discrepancies and differences between particular ethnic groups when it comes to exclusion. Now those who run our schools will have to explain or change—that is the whole purpose of the exercise.

On a coherent race equality strategy, again, I hear what the noble Baroness says. As I mentioned a moment ago, there will be an interministerial group to take this forward. I anticipate that there will be interest in both this House and another place now that we have published the report and the Government have explained how they are making progress in eliminating some of the discrimination that has appeared.