Human beings are not primarily creatures of consistency. Even so, there are times when government policy can leave the most fair-minded observer scratching her head or furrowing his brow. Seema Malhotra, who combines Home Office responsibility for migration and citizenship with the role of Minister for Equalities handling race and ethnicity, has launched a consultation on equal pay. In what barristers might call a leading question, one of the areas specifically mentioned is ‘improving the enforcement of equal pay rights by establishing an Equal Pay Regulatory and Enforcement Unit, with the involvement of trade unions’.
An Equal Pay Regulatory and Enforcement Unit would be, in plain terms, a quango: the quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisations which administer the detail of swathes of government policy. ‘Wait!’ you exclaim. Has not Pat McFadden, the Cabinet Office minister, just written to all government departments asking them to justify the existence of each and every taxpayer-funded organisation which is not directly controlled by ministers? Did not the Cabinet Office brief the media that the presumption would be to scrap quangos unless there was a compelling reason to keep them?
Well, yes, that did happen.
But did not the Prime Minister himself declare publicly that ministers should take a more active role in delivering government policy and accept greater responsibility for decision-making, rather than ‘outsourcing’ these roles to arm’s-length bodies? Had not the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, told regulators in January that they had ‘a part to play by tearing down the regulatory barriers that hold back growth’?
Yes, that happened too. No one promised consistency.
The idea of a new regulatory body to enforce equal pay for those from ethnic-minority backgrounds and people with disabilities is a particularly hazardous path to take. Note that it creates no new rights: there is a statutory entitlement to equal pay in section 39 of the Equality Act 2010 (of which I, for my sins, clerked the public bill committee stage). The purpose of this new body would be ‘making the right to equal pay effective’, an apparent admission that, 15 years after the Equality Act came into force, it is not working.
(Curiously, however, the Government does not say that the act is not working. It is undertaking a separate consultation on how to introduce mandatory ethnicity and disability pay reporting, in the same way such reporting exists on the basis of sex. This would show the prevalence of pay discrimination on the basis of race or disability, but the logical conclusion is that ministers, as card-carrying progressives already assume that such discrimination is a serious problem.)
Equal pay is not a new cause. The Labour Party’s manifesto for the 1964 general election, ‘The New Britain’, promised a charter of rights for all employees, including ‘the right to equal pay for equal work’, and the Equal Pay Act 1970 was given Royal Assent three weeks before Harold Wilson’s government was voted out of office.
At the same time, it is not a cost-free cause either. At the end of last year, Birmingham City Council agreed a settlement of historical claims over equal pay which left it with liabilities of £760 million; this had already led to the council, Britain’s largest local authority, issuing a report under section 114(3) of the Local Government Finance Act 1988 to declare ‘the expenditure of the authority incurred (including expenditure it proposes to incur) in a financial year is likely to exceed the resources (including sums borrowed) available to it to meet that expenditure’. Effectively, Birmingham City Council went into bankruptcy.
Keir Starmer has talked a good game on deregulation. He has railed against ‘a morass of regulation’, ‘thickets of red tape’ and ‘regulatory weeds’, eliminating which is central to his Plan for Change. Yet the Employment Rights Bill, which will increase the regulatory burden on business, is currently before Parliament; now the Minister for Equalities is eyeing a new, separate regulator to police the private sector, for offences which seem to be so far assumed rather than borne out by evidence.
Ministers also appear minded to deliver on a commitment in last year’s Labour manifesto and bring into force the previously uncommenced socio-economic duty contained in section 1 of the Equality Act. This requires a public body to ‘have due regard to the desirability of exercising [its functions] in a way that is designed to reduce the inequalities of outcome which result from socio-economic disadvantage’.
The idea that the Government is ‘laser-focused’ on growth is laughable and disproved by its actions. It wants to seem tough, but it simultaneously burnishes its progressive credentials and hugs its trades union allies close, never acknowledging that these priorities might be in conflict.
Equal pay is a worthy cause. But it is already the law of the land, and has been in some instances for more than half a century. The Prime Minister believes in ‘active government’, but, again and again, his deeds betray a government which is positively hyperactive.
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