Knife and drug policing set for reform in wake of race report

It also said that “racialised terms” such as “white privilege” were “unhelpful, stigmatising and potentially divisive” and “pitted groups against each other”.

It pledged to overhaul the teaching of history in schools around issues such as slavery to “help pupils understand the intertwined nature of British and global history”.

Other proposals put forward by the government include:

Increased funding for the Equality and Human Rights Commission to investigate and prosecute cases of race discrimination.

A new programme to identify and tackle disparities in education among different ethnic groups.

A government-backed “inclusion at work panel” to help employers improve race equality and career progression.

The report commits ministers to significant changes to the criminal justice system, which campaigners have long argued has discriminated against and unfairly targeted young black men in particular.

It pledges to reform police powers to stop and search, and to create local independent scrutiny panels to oversee the use of such powers and improve training for officers. It also calls for a much more consistent use of body-worn cameras and better training for police officers in de-escalating conflict.

Ministers also intend to test plans to dramatically reduce the number of young offenders who are taken to court for first-time drug offences, through a new system of “deferred prosecution”.

There is evidence that young black prison inmates are far more likely to reoffend after release than their white peers, with criminal records often being a block to employment, making “a life of crime far more likely”.

Launching the plan, Kemi Badenoch, the equalities minister, said that while she “strongly believed” Britain was the “fairest and most open-minded country in the world”, there was more to be done “to foster inclusion and enable everyone to reach their full potential”.

She said: “We do not agree with those who think that lack of opportunity should be seen solely through the prism of ethnic minority disadvantage.”

The Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, formed in July 2020 after the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, said that Britain had become a more open society and that racial inequalities had narrowed in education and employment.

However its report, published last year, was criticised by race campaigners, some of whom claimed that its “purpose was to whitewash the problems of racism in Britain”.

This was roundly rejected by Tony Sewell, the commission’s chairman, who said yesterday that the government’s response to the commission’s findings was encouraging.

“This is a major step towards a fairer, more open and more inclusive society and, importantly, focuses on the practical actions that will improve people’s lives,” he said.

The Runnymede Trust, the equalities think tank, said the recommendations would “not go far enough to address the scale of injustices facing black and ethnic minority communities”.

Tackling pay, health and education gaps to root out inequality

From healthcare to education, crime and employment the government’s inclusive Britain report makes nearly 70 recommendations to improve equality. They include:

Employment
The report says employers face “significant obstacles” in drawing up meaningful ethnicity pay-gap reporting. It commits ministers to backing a system that will break data down to specific ethnic groups and compare their performance across demographically different areas.

Once equipped with a “trustworthy, consistent standard for reporting”, employers would be expected by ministers to take “meaningful action to identify and then tackle the causes of disparate pay”.

Regulators would for the first time report on how individual NHS trusts were reducing employment inequalities.

The report says that some ethnic minority groups face additional challenges to moving out of low-paid work. It commits the government to a support programme at every jobcentre to create “tailored progression plans” to help employees up the career ladder.

Health
While challenging a “widespread view that ethnic minorities always have worse health outcomes than white people”, the report admits that there are substantial differences in death rates between different ethnic groups. It commits the government to publishing a strategy to reduce the gap in health outcomes and tackle health disparities by the end of the year.

A review will look into potential racial bias in medical equipment and a new Office for Health Improvement and Disparities that would examine inequalities such as deprivation, alcohol use and diet, which often disproportionately affect some ethnic groups.

Children and education
Responding to figures showing that black children are more likely to be in care and less likely to be adopted, the review promises a campaign to match children with adoptive families and says agencies must not delay placing a child with the prospective adopter because they do not share the child’s ethnic or cultural background.

Research will be done this year to see whether there is a causal link between certain ethnic groups and differences in pupil attainment. The government will adopt strategies used by academy trusts that have bridged achievement gaps between ethnic groups.

There will be a search for new ways to help ethnic minority pupils transfer to university after evidence showed that although they outperformed their white peers at school, at university they were more likely to drop out, have lower levels of attainment and lower earnings after graduating.

Criminal justice
The report says that only about half of suspects in custody request legal advice, often leading them to take poor decisions that can lead to harsher penalties. Ministers plan trials of a switch to suspects having to explicitly opt out of free legal advice.

More first-time offenders, particularly for drug crime, will be dealt with without going to court or by deferred prosecutions, to avoid young black men getting criminal records that can hinder their chances of getting jobs.

To make police forces more representative of the communities they serve, ministers are looking at introducing a local residency requirement for certain roles and changing recruitment processes to meet local needs.

Chance to make a difference

When the commission on race and ethnic disparities published its 200-page report last year its conclusions and recommendations were largely overshadowed by a wave of righteous outrage.

Equalities campaigners seized on the report’s conclusion that Britain should no longer be seen as structurally racist to cast aspersions on the motivations of the report’s authors.

The commissioners, led by the educationalist Tony Sewell, were also accused of attempting to sweep Britain’s colonial history “under the carpet” for suggesting that children should be taught “multiple, nuanced stories” about the country’s past.

Little attention was paid to the report’s 24 recommendations across the spheres of education, criminal justice, business and health that were more profound than they were given credit for. Today the government has come back with its response and has largely endorsed and promised to implement most of the commission’s ideas.

They include far-reaching plans to tackle the disproportionate number of young black men who are jailed for first-time drug offences.

Ministers have also committed to reforming stop and search — putting the emphasis on police to use the power proportionately — with independent panels to oversee the changes.

Elsewhere, the government has pledged to provide more money to the Equality and Human Rights Commission to investigate cases of racial discrimination.

It also lays out measures to help businesses tackle racial pay gaps and the lack of support around career progression that has been shown to hold back ethnic minorities.

This is an acknowledgement that racial disparities still exist in Britain across a whole range of areas.

The challenge for the government now is to demonstrate that it can implement these policies in a way that makes tangible differences to people’s lives.