Examination of Witnesses (Questions 170
- 179)
MONDAY 20 NOVEMBER 2006
MS AMANDA
ARISS, MS
KAVERI SHARMA,
MR ALAN
CHRISTIE AND
MR SUKHVINDER
SINGH
Q170 Justine Greening: You are saying,
given how many people the public sector itself employs, that the
Government could walk the talk a bit more, robustly perhaps?
Mr Christie: The bigger benefit
is not so much the number that the public sector employs directly
but the number that could be employed by contractors providing
services to the public sector, which would be available to ethnic
minority populations if the procurement programme was more aggressive
than it is currently. I think the overarching piece in all of
this is to ask the question is the policy being developed by people
who reflect the community that is being served, do they actually
understand the needs of the community that is being served. We
talked about particular challenges for Bangladeshi women, for
example, what efforts are in place which engage Bangladeshi women
in the development of employment programmes to serve them. There
is a huge opportunity to explore possibilities in that direction
which would be of some benefit.
Q171 Justine Greening: Clearly, you
think that the role of targeted employment programmes can work
very, very effectively?
Mr Christie: Yes. I think targeted
programmes are important. I will not say that there is not a place
for broad-brush approaches as well, but certainly targeting, particularly
to reach hard to reach communities, is absolutely vital.
Q172 Justine Greening: Do you feel
that sometimes these programmes do not get long enough to bed
down, and they are cut perhaps before we get to see whether they
really work?
Mr Christie: Certainly, I think
we would all acknowledge that some of the issues which are being
dealt with are difficult and complex and they are going to take
time to be resolved. Whether the programmes get long enough is
like how long is a piece of string. Honestly, I do not know the
answer to that.
Q173 Justine Greening: I see nods
from the Equal Opportunities Commission?
Ms Ariss: Yes. I think we are
going to have quite an outbreak of agreement really between the
EOC and the CRE about much that we are going to be saying. I think
we would also see a very important role for public procurement;
one of the reasons I think we would stress is that it has got
tremendous potential, which in this country is not really being
used. Although we have already got a law in place which requires
public bodies to pay due regard to the need to promote race equality
in the way they carry out all their functions, and that includes
procurement, my understanding is that, public bodies, I suppose
you could say most charitably that their response has been very
mixed and we are very concerned that should be the case. Just
to cite one example, we have given some evidence recently to the
Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport, highlighting our
concern in the context of the legacy for the Olympics, that the
Olympics Delivery Authority is not doing anything like enough
to make sure that people who live in the boroughs where the Olympics
will take place are going to be in a position to benefit from
the job creation that the Olympics are expected to bring. If you
look at the boroughs that we are talking about, places like Newham
and Tower Hamlets, there is a huge pool of potential workers there,
including large numbers of ethnic minority women and men; there
is plenty of evidence of a lot of people who are out of work but
want jobs. It looks like a golden opportunity really to make that
legacy work, and it is not happening.
Q174 Justine Greening: Why do you
think that opportunity is being missed?
Ms Ariss: That is quite hard to
say. I think it is partly that the people in charge of procurement
may not realise quite what a big difference they could make if
they could do things differently and I think it is partly about
leadership, that there needs to be some very consistent leadership
from the top of organisations to say "This is part of how
we do business." It is partly about awareness-raising, partly
about leadership, I think it is also about public bodies, which
are not doing what they could be, being challenged by organisations,
like ourselves, to do better.
Q175 Justine Greening: One of the
people who gave evidence earlier was talking about this pipeline.
Do you think there is not enough focus on the pipeline which the
Olympics are obviously at the end of? It seems to me, as a London
MP, that you would have to try really quite hard not to involve
your local community in the job opportunities which something
like the Olympics creates. I am surprised to hear what you are
saying.
Ms Ariss: You would think it would
follow, would you not, but it does not always. There is a framework
of European law around procurement which governs how large contracts,
how tenders, are let; they have to be advertised in a particular
way. Obviously, you have got firms from all over Europe, potentially,
or all over the world, putting in for these sorts of contracts,
not just people who are based in the area, which would benefit.
Q176 Justine Greening: You are saying
that one of the problems actually is that there can be a conflict;
the best value for the overall project itself may not equal what
is best for the community, in terms of what we are trying to achieve
with the Olympics?
Ms Ariss: The law does allow people
to take equality into account, and we produced some guidance and
a Code of Practice, which in fact is a draft Code of Practice
because it is with Parliament at the moment, which sets out the
steps that contractors can take, so there is a great deal that
they can do, it is just that many of them do not actually do it.
Mr Christie: The mantra you will
hear from procurement professionals is that it is difficult, and
adding in the equalities element is a complication. There is a
role here for leadership. We are involved in the Ethnic Minority
Employment Task Force, the cross-departmental Task Force; we have
three departmental pilot projects. There are other departments
which have stated that they are unable to identify a single contracting
project which would be appropriate for an equalities pilot, which
strikes us as surprising. We would argue certainly that all of
these contracts, all government contracts, should be appropriate
and should be regarded as an opportunity to promote equality.
The problem is that the procurement professionals will tell you
that this is difficult, this is hard, there is an additional level
of complication and they have got many other factors to take into
account.
Q177 Justine Greening: What are the
reasons they are saying which make it hard for them?
Mr Christie: It is legal, to a
large degree, it is meeting their competitive tender responsibilities,
they have got to get value for money, and so on and so forth,
and how you balance value for money against equality, for instance,
how you assess those. This is where the leadership thing comes
in. This is where, for example, Transport for London has
shown great initiative and determination in the way that they
have gone about procurement for the East London Line project,
and in many ways is creating an exemplar of the way this ought
to be done and the way that we would believe central government
in general ought to behave, and local government in general ought
to behave, in pursuing their procurement policies.
Q178 Justine Greening: You have already
touched upon the fact that there are some quite substantial differences
within the ethnic minorities brand, if you like, which mean really
that it is, as I said, quite a blunt instrument, that you need
to look beneath, there are problems with gender perhaps and also
age. Going forward, what sorts of implications do you think that
those quite big differences will have for the sorts of policies
we need to have in place to tackle those groups?
Ms Ariss: It is a very complicated
picture. As you say, there are differences in the experiences
in getting into work of ethnic minority women and ethnic minority
men, between different groups of ethnic minority people, both
women and men, there are differences between generations. We have
found also, interestingly, that there are some quite big differences
connected to place, and we are not entirely sure why those are
there, but they are very interesting. We found, for example, that
in Tameside about 20% of Bangladeshi women are economically active
and in Croydon 51% of Bangladeshi women are economically active,
and that is not because there is a huge difference in the age
structure of the population of Bangladeshi women in those two
places. That is a very big difference and you do not find a similar
difference in the employment rates of white women; so there is
something interesting going on about place.
Q179 Justine Greening: Is there any
evidence behind that, whether it is to do with job opportunities
or whether it is attitudinal, and perhaps those communities are
happier for women to work; perhaps that is a stereotype?
Ms Ariss: We do not know. It is
a fairly new finding, that there seem to be big differences in
employment rates between otherwise similar groups of ethnic minority
women in different parts of the country. I think probably what
it says is that there needs to be some quite clever work done
by people like local authorities and Regional Development Agencies
to look at what is really going on in their particular area, because
the national picture may conceal as much as it reveals. If it
is radically different from what is going on in their area then
the national figures are not going to be very helpful, in terms
of developing a strategy. Really some more work needs to be done
to get underneath why those differences are there.
Mr Christie: We have no more idea
than EOC has in this area, but again it just seems to me that
this again talks to the need for engaging with the community and
developing responses to their needs, because the communities are
different and they will require tailored responses. If we do not
have systems in place which will allow us to engage with those
communities at that level, to give them the opportunity to be
part of the policy-making solution, then probably we have a problem.
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