Doing their duty

Posted by: Jules Birch

28/04/2009

Can a duty to consider reducing socio-economic inequality result in anything more than a new set of boxes for public authorities to tick?

The sceptical case against the new duty proposed in the Equality Bill is pretty easy to make. Authorities that care about inequality will already be doing what they can - those that don’t will merely cut and paste a new paragraph into their strategies saying they’ve considered it.

The optimistic case is that it will force bodies like local authorities to spend more to offer extra support to disadvantaged communities to make sure they have the same access to services as other residents.  For pundits like Polly Toynbee the Bill may not offer ‘socialism in one clause’ but it does represent a big step forward in its recognition that class matters.

The duty would apply to all public authorities, including local authorities, government departments and presumably housing associations too if the courts ignore their case that they are not public bodies.

The government’s guide to the Bill mentions housing just once in its explanation of how the socio-economic duty would work: ‘A local education authority could evaluate the schools application process and find that some parents in social housing were having difficulty navigating the system and getting their child a place at a school. The authority could then target support at people living on housing estates to help them with the application process.’

But is that really enough when in towns and cities around the country residents of social housing estates are stuck in the catchment areas of the worst-performing schools while well-heeled parents can buy their way into the catchment areas of the best? That seems to demand more fundamental reform of the school system than help with the application process for the disadvantaged - or will estate residents be schooled in how to manipulate their way into religious schools with informal selection policies?

The impact assessment for the Bill also mentions housing once with an analysis of a proposal to require landlords to make adjustments to common parts of let residential properties where reasonable. It estimates that 57,000 disabled people face difficulties because of inaccessible common parts and that half of them could be helped in the first year following a legislative change at a cost of £27m in extra disabled facilities grant. 

The Bill itself also mentions housing once - in the background to the legislation. This reveals that a European draft directive is currently under negotiation. Published nine months ago it would ‘prohibit discrimination on grounds of disability, religion or belief, sexual orientation and age, in access to goods and services, housing, education, social protection, social security and social advantage’. 

A duty to consider reducing socio-economic inequality sounds to me like a watered down version of the same thing. It’s a step in the right direction but only a small step.