Commission's birthday blues

It is a year since the Equality and Human Rights Commission took over the fight for rights from the Disability Rights Commission. But all is not well at the new equality watchdog. John Pring investigates

Chaotic, unimpressive, disappointing, disengaged, weak.

Not words the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) will want to hear used to describe its first year as Britain’s first single equalities body. Particularly when the words represent an almost universal sense of disappointment in its first year and have come from well-known figures in the disability sector, including former senior figures in the Disability Rights Commission (DRC).

The criticism covers almost every part of its operation: the unattractive and uninformative website; a lack of vigour in speaking out on behalf of disabled people; a loss of momentum in tackling discrimination and a failure to take advantage of a healthy legacy from the DRC; poor relations with the disability movement; and low staff morale.

As an end-of-term report, it could hardly be worse.

The EHRC has tried to put the criticisms in context, with Neil Crowther, who was head of policy at the DRC and is now the EHRC’s director of disability programmes, confident it is now positioned to make serious progress.

But the criticisms from within the movement are summed up by Caroline Gooding, the highly-respected former director of law reform at the DRC. “I think the EHRC performance is not impressive…on disability it is particularly poor and it does suffer in comparison with the DRC,” she says.

There has also been criticism from outside the disability sector. The Confederation of British Industry (CBI) says the EHRC “doesn’t seem to have a clear strategy” and that it is still waiting for guidance for employers on creating a more diverse workforce.

The CBI’s annual employment trends survey showed 11 per cent of employers believe the main barrier to creating a more diverse workforce is a lack of support and guidance from equality bodies and the government. Last year, it was seven per cent. Not a ringing endorsement of the EHRC’s first year.

No-one argues that the EHRC has had an easy task. It was set up to replace the three “legacy” commissions: the DRC, the Equal Opportunities Commission and the Commission for Racial Equality. But it also took on responsibility for age, sexual orientation, and religion, as well as human rights.

Its annual budget perhaps does not reflect those extra responsibilities. The DRC’s budget for its last full year (2006/07) was £21.2 million, compared with a budget of £70 million for the entire EHRC.

Crowther says the issue is not a lack of money, but that the EHRC is not working at full capacity as it has yet to recruit all the staff it needs. For example, there is still no head of parliamentary affairs.

Colm O’Cinneide, a senior law lecturer at University College London, who researched single equality bodies for the DRC, says insufficient attention was paid to the “nuts and bolts of establishing a new organisation” in the years before last October’s launch.

A former senior figure from the DRC agrees. “If you compared it to the DRC, which had less than six months to get itself up and running, there were people being paid to set the whole thing up for years before the EHRC actually opened – but so much of the basic practical stuff remained to be done on day one.”

The EHRC also seems to be missing the expertise of former DRC talent, after apparently giving the impression that it wanted a fresh start and wasn’t much interested in staff from the legacy commissions.

One senior figure in the disability sector adds: “There are many people there who still don’t know what their job titles are. It is quite difficult to get hold of people and find out who is leading on what.”

Crowther acknowledges that “everyone would have liked to have done this faster” but says that “there is a process to go through”.

He seems to accept that morale has not been high, but adds: “We are at the point where people are starting to bear fruit from their labours and are feeling more secure and focused on where they are going.”

Statistics from the EHRC’s first year raise further concerns.

In 2006/07, the DRC’s helpline dealt with 104,000 queries. In its first 11 months, the EHRC dealt with just 26,000, covering all of its strands, although this was just in England.

Baroness [Jane] Campbell, an EHRC commissioner, says she is “deeply worried” about the helpline figures and says improving them is an “urgent priority”.

There were 3.6 million “visitor sessions” on the DRC’s website in 2006/07, compared with just 1.2 million in the first ten months of the EHRC’s site. One critic is furious that much of the work done by the DRC, including official guidance it wrote for the government, is not available on the EHRC website.

The EHRC’s conciliation service also suffers by comparison, with 125 cases in ten months, compared with 217 taken on by the DRC in its last full year.

Crowther says it is unfair to compare the EHRC’s first year with the DRC’s last, but seems to recognise there is an issue, particularly with the helpline. “With the helpline, we would want to look into that and why there has been that kind of dip,” he says. He also points out that the EHRC has not had the chance to run the kind of advertising campaign that drove traffic to the DRC website. The website will improve, he says.

But Sir Bert Massie, who chaired the DRC and is a “transitional” commissioner with the EHRC, says: “You can’t just say the commission is in its first year, because it was set up over two or three years and it has inherited a whole range of work from the legacy commissions. It should have been up and running a lot more quickly.”

He adds: “What you don’t see in all the big disability debates, is the EHRC being there as the DRC was there.”

Gooding says the EHRC’s first year has been “disappointing”. She points to a loss of momentum in ensuring that public bodies do what they said they would do in their disability equality schemes. “It is a real lost opportunity,” she says. “You have to be visible in what you do and it’s just not there.”

Crowther recognises that there has not been enough visible work in this area, but says the EHRC is enforcing the schemes and will soon publish its results. He says there is a great opportunity in December, with new legal duties for secretaries of state to report on progress towards disability equality in their sectors, and the EHRC will take action if necessary.

Gooding was also appalled at the lack of EHRC leadership following the Lords ruling in June which found that the London borough of Lewisham did not discriminate against a man with schizophrenia who was evicted from his council house. Gooding says the ruling “knocked a great big hole in the Disability Discrimination Act”. There is nothing about the case on the EHRC website, and there has been no “visible leadership” on such a “critical” case, she says.

The EHRC is working on producing “an objective and dispassionate statement” but Baroness Campbell agrees that the EHRC “could have done more”, and blames this partly on a lack of expertise and resources during its first year.

Sue Bott, director of the National Centre for Independent Living, says the EHRC has failed to capitalise on the DRC’s “very good groundwork”. “I think it is a complete muddle and I am not sure who they want to work with. It doesn’t feel that disability is owned by the commission as a whole.”

Agnes Fletcher, former director of policy and communications at the DRC, says there does not seem to be “a coherent framing narrative” for the EHRC, although she is encouraged by its work on class and poverty and how they magnify discrimination, and says it probably took the DRC three years to be “clear and confident in its overall message”.

But she says there is a huge task still to be done on raising awareness of disability discrimination. Investing in research, case studies and helpline statistics is vital, she says. “It takes a fair amount of resourcing and needs to be thought important – and I don’t know from the outside whether it is.”

Baroness Campbell, who will shortly be stepping down as chair of the EHRC’s disability committee, describes its first year as “creative, dynamic” and “a year of exploration”, but accepts that some of the criticism is “perfectly understandable”. “It’s what I expected in the first year or two years. That’s what happens when change takes place,” she says.

She believes the commission is “moving in the right direction” and will bring different groups together to create a “new and more dynamic campaign for equality and human rights”, with some of the “very important and absolutely essential disability work” carried out through co-production with voluntary organisations.

Crowther says there will be a series of EHRC initiatives over the next few months, including work on the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, disability hate crime, and a social care report. He says it is only through the alliances it can form that the EHRC will persuade the government to invest in and reform the social care system and tackle poverty.

But the disability sector is yet to be convinced.

One senior figure says the EHRC’s first year has been “chaotic, unimpressive and disengaged”. “The DRC was good at sharing information and working with disabled people and the wider disability sector. I get the impression that the EHRC is really not interested in working on an ally basis with the sector.”

Sir Bert adds: “I hear criticisms and say, ‘Let’s give it a bit longer.’ But it has to start really delivering. That means you have to make disability seem like a priority for the commission.

“If you are going to eliminate discrimination against disabled people, you need to go on fighting. If you don’t, you will actually go backwards. People think disability equality is done, and it isn’t.”

Picture: © James Steidl - Fotolia. Illustrated by Jamie Trounce