UK contexts on Equality in Scotland

Scotland's First Minister has for some time used a crude benchmark when proclaiming Scotland's performance under her presidential-style leadership - regularly claiming it is better than what is happening in England. This has become particularly pronounced during the 2020 Covid pandemic.

From an equality perspective, this has been difficult to evidence, especially since Scottish government has consistently failed to gather data centrally, or task others to gather data centrally, which allows citizens to track how, say, Councils, have performed over a period of time in delivering, say, gender pay equality.

Equality Here, Now has, in recent years, published research findings into establishing just how much Scotland’s specific equality duties, adopted in May 2012, have achieved in eliminating discrimination in the employment practices and cultures of the public sector. Amongst other things, the duties required that public bodies gather data on their workforce by protected characteristic and use it to help them better perform their general equality duty to eliminate discrimination, advance equality of opportunity, and foster good relations.

Research carried out in 2016 aimed to provide a wider context for scrutiny of Scotland’s public sector performance by setting it alongside data gathered from other parts of Britain. The scope of the research reports deal with the data made available by the NHS in Scotland, England, and Wales on the employment of disabled people and of BME people.

On the protected characteristic of disability, the research concluded :

Based on the employment data sets published by the NHS itself across Britain, the NHS in Scotland is failing to deliver a measurable level of equality of employment opportunity for disabled people when compared to the performance of neighbours.

If one assumes that the level of institutional disability discrimination in the cultures and practices of individual boards, trusts and foundations which make up the NHS across Britain is unlikely to vary to any significant extent on the basis of national area alone, then the remaining significant influences on this poor performance on equality of employment opportunity for disabled people and which are unique to the NHS in Scotland are Scotland’s specific equality duties, the NHS’s Equality Directorate and the Scotland Office of the Equality & Human Rights Commission.

On the protected characteristic of ethnicity, the research concluded :

Based on the employment data sets published by the NHS itself across Britain, the NHS in Scotland is failing to deliver a measurable level of equality of employment opportunity for BME people when compared to the performance of neighbours.

If one assumes that the level of institutional racial discrimination in the cultures and practices of individual boards, trusts and foundations which make up the NHS across Britain is unlikely to vary to any fundamental extent on the basis of national area alone, then the remaining significant influences on this poor performance and which are unique to the NHS in Scotland are Scotland’s specific equality duties, the Equality Directorate and the Scotland Office of the Equality & Human Rights Commission.