Whitehall departments fail on equality duties

Major government departments such as the Cabinet Office, Home Office and Foreign Office face legal action for a failure to carry out racial equality duties under the Race Equality Act 2001, according to a report to be published by the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE).

In all, the CRE has written to 15 Government departments, expressing “deep concerns about widespread non-compliance” around Whitehall.

The CRE is being dissolved into the Commission for Equality and Human Rights (CEHR) from 1 October and it expects its successor to continue with legal action.

The final monitoring report concludes that the overall findings are disappointing: “small local authorities with limited budgets are meeting legal responsibilities while some of the biggest spending Whitehall departments are failing to achieve even basic compliance.”

The Department of Communities and Local Government has not yet collected records on the ethnic background of 58% of its staff, and failure of Hazel Blears's Communities and Local Government Department to produce a race equality duty "toolkit" has "underlined the degree to which Whitehall has failed to realise the urgency of the current situation".

The findings of the two-year monitoring exercise by the CRE are published today (19 September) alongside a policy paper giving a final verdict, which argues that Britain, despite being the fifth largest economy in the world, is still a place of inequality, exclusion and isolation where segregation is increasing and political and religious extremism is on the rise.

The monitoring report, circulated to commissioners, revealed that Whitehall has failed to comply with its duties to monitor the ethnic background of its staff and carry out formal assessments of the impact of its policies on racial equality.

"In recent months, the commission has felt it necessary to initiate enforcement action against seven different Whitehall departments and agencies in respect of non-compliance of race equality, employment duty returns and in the case of the Department of Health, the failure to systematically carry out race equality impact assessments of new and proposed policies. It is likely that this number could rise in the weeks prior to the closure of the commission."