Structural discrimination in the provision of services across the public sector impacts negatively on the daily lived experiences of people sharing any of the protected characteristics. The quality of daily living for too many people is such that exclusion and marginalisation becomes institutionalised over the course of a lifetime and almost certainly leads to a life not fully lived, either in potential or in quality.
While Scotland has specific equality duties which require public bodies to gather and publish data on people employed and so enable transparency and accountability in equality of employment opportunity, there are no specific equality duties which require public bodies to gather and publish data which enables public scrutiny and accountability on just how much equality there is for people in access to, experience of and outcome from services provided by public bodies.
Past research projects which have scrutinised performance of public bodies in the area of employment equality did reveal as a by-product that there are some public bodies who realise this represents an imbalance and have put in place systems to gather and publish relevant data. Stirling University, for example has been able to evidence the size of attainment gap in students by protected characteristic,reporting data sets for BME students as against non-BME students.
This research report from 2020 aims to provide an aggregation of what all 32 of Scotland’s Councils are doing in gathering data to evidence equality for people in access to, experience of, and outcome from Council services, with a particular focus on the protected characteristics of disability, ethnicity, sexual orientation and religion [particularly people identifying as Catholic or Protestant].
Key findings, include:
just one Council [Glasgow] said they were gathering data on service users. The Council did not however supply any samples of data gathered nor any reports using the data gathered to show that services were equally accessible
the rest of the 31 Councils in Scotland were unable to provide evidence of data gathering and use of the data to show services are equally accessible
this inevitably means that structural discrimination in the key functions of the bulk of Scotland’s Councils is going untraced, unchallenged and unchanged
Councils are not alone in their failure to show access to services is equally available to all. Scottish government, COSLA, the Improvement Service, the Equality & Human Rights Commission and Audit Scotland are all aware to some extent or another of the failure of Councils and so are complicit in that failure to deliver equality of access in Council services
Structural discrimination in the provision of services across the public sector impacts negatively on the daily lived experiences of people sharing any of the protected characteristics
The quality of daily living for too many people is such that exclusion and marginalisation becomes institutionalised over the course of a lifetime and almost certainly leads to a life not fully lived, either in potential or in quality
Enforcement of the provisions of the Equality Act 2010 is not delivering an end to the marginalisation and exclusion of people from public sector services and needs to be refreshed
The research reveals that structural discrimination across the range of public sector services is going untraced, unchallenged and unchanged in the 10 years which have passed since the Equality Act 2010 came into force. It does appear that the law, and enforcement practices and cultures, as exist today are simply not working and are in need of reform.