Black and Minority Ethnic People: Workplace Issues

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh (Lab)]

My Lords, I begin by congratulating the Minister on introducing the debate. I remember sponsoring a similar debate in this House about 12 to 13 years ago. I was struck by the fact that almost all the speakers came from the Lib Dem and Labour Benches, with hardly anyone from the Conservative side. The shadow Minister was the only one. In his sovereign loneliness he struck us as rather a strange figure. Today the Minister has not only spoken about the subject but initiated it. That says something about the kind of progress that we have made in this country. I compliment her in particular on speaking with such eloquence on some of the issues relating to the subject.

While we have made some progress, we still have a long way to go, as many noble Lords said. I will talk about those issues. I have been used to using the words “ethnic minorities” rather than the words “black and minority ethnic”, which are strange. I will continue to talk about ethnic minorities. According to the census of 2011, ethnic minorities constitute 19.5% of the population. However, they disproportionately bear the impact of unemployment. The rate of unemployment among them is not only higher; they are also most vulnerable to losing their jobs. The unemployment rate among the ethnic minorities is not evenly spread. Among the Indians it tends to be roughly the same as within the white population, but among the Afro-Caribbeans and others it is as high as 14% to 15%—three times the national average.

Degrees or higher qualifications do not seem to help. In fact, those with higher qualifications are two-and-a-half times more likely to be unemployed than their white counterparts. It is also striking that, for the same job, a black person applying would need higher qualifications than his white counterpart. This is what social scientists call the “ethnic penalty”: the same qualification does not take you to the same destination. In the case of ethnic minorities, a higher qualification is required.

If one looks at the FTSE index, the picture is even more disturbing. If one takes 100 companies, 98% of the chairs, 96% of the CEOs and 95% of the chief financial officers are white. If one looks at the Civil Service, again, the situation is not terribly good. Ethnic Dimension, a research consultancy, pointed out in 2014 what is wrong and at what stages ethnic minorities are to be found. It is quite striking, for example, that if one looks at the Civil Service and the various stages at which ethnic minorities operate, they are disproportionately represented on the lower rungs of the Civil Service hierarchy and very poorly represented among the Permanent Secretaries and others. If one looks at representation among the higher echelons of the diplomatic service, it is striking that the proportion is even smaller. If one looks at health trusts or the royal colleges, as many have pointed out, ethnic minority representation is extremely poor.

All this needs no elaboration except to show how much work remains to be done. It is this that I want to concentrate on during the five or six more minutes I have at my disposal. The Runnymede Trust’s Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain, which I was privileged to chair and whose report was wrongly named after me, proposed a number of initiatives and I want to reiterate some of them and to elaborate on a few others which have come up since. I hope that the noble Baroness, Lady McGregor-Smith, when she undertakes her review, will look at the positive side of what can be done, what obstacles stand in the way of ethnic minorities and what we need to do to remove those obstacles. So, at the risk of sounding rather schematic, let me run through six or seven recommendations that we made and that I would like to make again.

First, it is very important that every organisation, every company and every business should be required to have a race equality strategy with specific targets but not quotas, aspirational goals but not a legal requirement of jobs to fill. Secondly, there is the old idea of contract compliance. It is very important that public sector contracts should be used to improve a company’s race equality practice. Thirdly, application forms should be anonymised. This should be standard practice in all areas of life, so that people are not singled out as representing a particular ethnic group by virtue of their name. Fourthly, recruitment procedures in organisations and various companies should be clearly monitored, so that there is no room for self-selection or only choosing people of one’s own colour.

It is also important that companies should be asked to submit, in their annual reports, staff ethnicity figures—what percentages belong to ethnic minorities, at what stage of the company hierarchy and in what forms. It is also very important that more ethnic minorities should be recruited in the field of higher education. Here, I certainly appreciate the Prime Minister’s desire to increase by 20% the proportion of ethnic minority students by 2020—but, as one of the Peers said, this is a big challenge and I do not think that it is likely to happen. Also, if we do bring them into higher education, the question is what areas of higher education and what kinds of jobs will be available to them.

It is also important that racial stereotyping should be avoided. It is very striking, in the briefing material given to us, that Afro-Caribbeans, for example, are singled out as sportsmen or entertainers but you can hardly see a black face as a senior professor, a researcher or a poet. One can easily begin to see what kind of images and impressions this creates in the minds of those who read such things. Finally, race has in some ways shifted its locus, so that we no longer talk simply about colour or culture, we also talk about religion. Muslims have, in many cases, become the target for this kind of discrimination and disadvantage. A recent survey, for example, showed that a Muslim name can invite discrimination, but that if the person was not wearing Muslim dress, such as a headscarf or whatever, he tended to escape any kind of disadvantage—dress becomes a site of contestation, a sign by which we recognise and identify people and discriminate against them. For all these reasons, I suggest not only that applications should be anonymised but as far as possible that discrimination and disadvantage of this kind should be eliminated.

These are some of the points also made by the noble Baroness, Lady Bottomley, and I commend them all yet again.