Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch has called for the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED) to be scrapped but what exactly is it and what does it do? The PSED is the piece of legislation that requires public authorities and public service providers to abide by the provisions of the Equality Act (2010), and it’s designed to ensure that everyone is treated fairly. This applies to employees of such organisations, and to the members of the public they serve. This week the PSED came under fire.
Badenoch, a former equalities minister, has endeavoured to attack not just the concept of equality but also the way the legislation has been designed. She has also suggested that it is now being used in a different manner from the way it was intended to be used.
“The idea that each person should be treated the same regardless of who they are, is a value so deeply ingrained in our culture that most people in Britain accept it as a self-evident truth”, she said, going on to add “activists…want the law to treat people differently on the basis of identity groups”.
Does the Public Sector Equality Duty mean treating people differently?
At the most basic level, Badenoch is correct to say that the PSED encourages organisations to treat people differently – but that’s because it’s there to ensure equality of outcome. Sometimes, in order to create equal conditions, it’s necessary to treat people in different ways. For example, an organisation might change seating arrangements so that a partially-sighted person can sit at the front during a presentation. This doesn’t mean that other attendees are being mistreated – it just means that the partially-sighted person can see better, and understand the presentation as well as everybody else.
A few days prior to Badenoch’s remarks, Reform UK’s Zia Yusuf accused the UK National Screening Committee of discriminating against white people because it recommended a selective approach to prostate cancer screening which meant more Black men than white men would be tested. But the reason for the committee’s decision was that overdiagnosis, when testing is applied too widely, can ruin men’s health. This harm can be avoided by focusing on patients whose genes predispose them to the disease, and Black men face twice the genetic risk that white men do. Treating these groups differently therefore results in better overall health outcomes for both.
Individual experiences don’t give the full picture
On a day which subsequently saw violent protests in Glasgow – at which anti-immigrant slogans were shouted, plus riots in Belfast – at which a pastor said he saw people forced from their homes “because they’re Black”, Badenoch claimed “modern Britain is the least racist country on Earth”. She argued that her own success is proof of this. But according to research commissioned last year by HR specialists Ciphr, almost a third of people of colour feel that their race or ethnicity has been a factor in not getting jobs they have applied for, while over two thirds have experienced discrimination at work.
The nine characteristics addressed in the Equality Act (2010) are there because research showed that people frequently latched onto them as a basis for discrimination. Research still shows this in all nine areas, but it also shows that discrimination has significantly decreased in contexts where the provisions of the act are applied. This includes areas where the PSED is what enables it to be applied. Because we know that discrimination is still a problem in society at large, we can reasonably assume that it would get worse in many areas of day-to-day life if the PSED were scrapped.
Who has a protected characteristic?
Everybody has at least one protected characteristic because everybody has a sex, race and age. The single most common basis for discrimination is age. This means that if the PSED were not in place, people at either end of the age spectrum could expect to find themselves turned away from services on a fairly frequent basis. People in their 40s and over would find it harder to get jobs in the public sector, as would young women, who are at high risk of discrimination based on employers’ belief that they may get pregnant.
One in four people in Scotland lives with a disability, and without the PSED, there would be nothing to oblige organisations to make their services accessible to disabled users. Removing this would likely lead to worse discrimination in areas like transport, sports, and even access to public buildings. Meanwhile, the government’s own research shows that disabled people face massive discrimination in employment. This is an area where public authorities generally do better than private companies, but without the PSED, there’s no guarantee that that would remain the case.
Recognising differences need not be divisive
In previous communications on the PSED, Badenoch has argued that organisations should focus on bringing society together, arguing that actions specific to groups with particular protected characteristics risk dividing society. The difficulty here is that treating such equality initiatives as divisive makes it impossible for organisations to remedy situations in which society is already divided. It would be better for everybody if, for example, homophobia were not an issue, but ignoring it will not make it go away. It also undermines efforts to deal with simple practical problems facing one group but not others, such as the need for differently shaped uniforms in order to let women be physically comfortable in historically male-dominated roles like firefighting.
In the US, much political capital has recently been made out of the idea that true equality means treating everyone the same way – resulting in problems as serious as the erosion of some people’s access to voting and as petty as the removal of resources about women in science. It should be obvious that this doesn’t help us to make progress in the real world.
The PSED is, first and foremost, a practical instrument, aimed at making sure that everybody can access what they need. When that includes access to employment, it makes it much easier to get the most capable people into every job, improving services and in doing so making life better for all of us.
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