EHRC to focus more on prevention than courtroom battles, says Phillips

The Equality and Human Rights Commission is to take a more systemic and preventive approach to tackling discrimination, with less emphasis on high-profile court battles, its chairman has said.

In a speech at think tank Policy Exchange earlier this week, Trevor Phillips said: “In the past both the legal framework and the political climate have to some extent forced our predecessors to focus on individual cases, courtroom battles and remedies after something has happened. Sometimes such cases set precedents that influence the way that others behave.

“But today, in the era of continuous cultural change this one-by-one, retrospective approach seems slow, overly legalistic and wholly inadequate to the scale of the challenge.”

Announcing plans for a greater focus on prevention, Phillips said the new environment meant that the EHRC could be “a little more ambitious and perhaps more radical” in its approach.

“You could summarise our aim for the next five years as making sure that people do the right thing when we're not in the room,” the EHRC chief said. “They need to know that we're outside the door ready to step in if it looks like they can't or won't do the job themselves; but in the best of all worlds the only people that we should be doing the legal mud-wrestling with are what some Americans now call the RBGs – the Really Bad Guys, like the BNP.”

Phillips said the Commission had already started the process of cutting its costs before the Comprehensive Spending Review. “Like everyone else in public service we're going to take a hit as a result of the spending review; but insofar as there's a silver lining here, I don't think it'll be any bigger than anywhere else,” he claimed.

The EHRC chairman suggested there might be a change in the balance between what his organisation does and what the government does itself. “There's no settlement on that issue yet, and it may take some months to get there. But we intend to ensure that the outcome will interfere as little as possible with our core mission in this new world.”

Phillips reported that the Commission was restructuring in order to focus on its contemporary mission – “to do our work more efficiently, for example using "lightning strike" investigations as well as our more lengthy formal legal inquiries”.

He said cuts at the organisation were being designed so it spends less money on its own bureaucracy, and more money on ensuring that government and business act according to the highest standards of equality and human rights.

“We have already saved the taxpayer tens of millions by removing the requirement for over 40,000 public bodies to produce elaborate equality schemes, which actually allowed people to pretend they were making a difference when all they were actually doing was ticking the boxes,” Philiips claimed.

He added that the EHRC would be explaining in coming weeks how it intends to play its part in reducing the fear of employment and anti-discrimination legislation.

There will also be “new outcome-focused ways of regulating both the private and public sectors that reward those who really work for inclusion; and ensuring that no-one is allowed to gain competitive advantage by trying to get round equality law”.

The EHRC will also put a greater emphasis on performance rankings and league tables, and expand its ideas for citizen-regulators, consumer-regulators and shareholder-regulators.

Phillips said the benchmarks for the future should reflect the best performance, “rather than the grudging achievement of the minimum legal threshold”.

In his speech Phillips also said:

• Equality and human rights were essential to economic recovery, and that the critics of the fairness agenda were “just plain wrong” and out of step with coalition Britain. “Without equality law we encourage cowboy capitalism, in which businesses cheat their fair-minded competition by treating their employees unfairly and short-changing their customers”
• The Equality Act 2010 will help the country to spend public money on those who really need it
• There will not be a sustainable recovery unless it is an inclusive recovery
• The fact that attitudes in general have changed should not lead to “the complacency that some of the equality agenda's critics are inviting.” The “equality warrior’s” job is not over, the battle is just on new fronts.
• The EHRC’s triennial review revealed some of the major issues for this decade. “The fact that black and Pakistani babies are twice as likely to die in their first year as White or Bangladeshi babies; the dreadful educational outcomes for groups like gypsies and travellers, some black and some white groups; the downward spiral of outcomes for disabled people particularly those with a history of mental illness; as well as the seemingly unshakeable employment and pay gaps facing even the most successful women and ethnic minorities”
• There is a consensus in amongst the three major political parties that there needs to be a legal basis for the fight against unfairness and inequality. “I think the politicians also agree that though we are doing better, we still have a lot of work to do”
• The state has a role to play in bringing down barriers of discrimination and exclusion. “First, by backing determined action against discrimination. And second by ensuring that its economic strategy is paralleled by an inclusion plan that prevents cuts and unemployment isolating some communities even further”
• The spending review and the cuts that follow must not fall disproportionately on already disadvantaged social groupings. “That is why we have launched a formal assessment of the October Spending Review's effects on social groupings protected under equality laws”

The EHRC’s Phillips said the Commission had a role to play in the process of deficit reduction. This would include by: “ensuring fairness and transparency, through for example regular surveys of the impact of cuts; providing evidence of need that will help public bodies focus their scarce resource on those who need them most; and removing unlawful and structural barriers to employment amongst underrepresented groups”.

He pledged that the EHRC would play its part in ensuring effective enforcement of the equality acts, “both to ensure that the spending review is implemented fairly, and to make sure that private companies which are doing the right thing aren't put at a disadvantage”.

Philip Hoult