A legal requirement forcing public bodies to try to reduce inequalities caused by class disadvantage will be scrapped, the home secretary announced today. In a speech setting out the government's attitude towards reducing inequalities, Theresa May said the measure – which was at the heart of the new Equality Act, introduced by Labour's Harriet Harman when she was equalities minister – would be abandoned.
The socioeconomic duty would have required all public bodies to assess whether they were addressing inequalities caused by class factors, encouraging them to improve, for example, health and education outcomes in more deprived areas. May dismissed the legislation as "ridiculous" and said it would not be enacted. "They thought they could make people's lives better by simply passing a law saying that they should be made better," she said. "That is why I am announcing today that we are scrapping Harman's law for good."
May's speech set a very different tone for the government's approach to tackling inequalities, moving away from regulation and towards encouraging organisations to choose to improve their record. She said she favoured a greater focus on "fairness" rather than "equality", arguing that many people felt alienated by the equality agenda. This nuanced shift is likely to make equality campaigners uneasy, on the grounds that "fairness" is a much vaguer and less legally enforceable concept than equality.
The government's emphasis would be on ensuring "equality of opportunity" rather than "equality of outcome", May said. "Even as we increase equality of opportunity, some people will always do better than others," the home secretary said. "I do not believe in a world where everybody gets the same out of life, regardless of what they put in. That is why no government should try to ensure equal outcomes for everyone." The concept of equality had, she argued, become a "dirty word", associated with "the worst forms of political correctness and social engineering".
"I recognise that 'fairness' is a word that many will feel is perhaps not as specific as 'equality'. But one of the problems is that equality has come to be seen by a lot of people as something that is available to others, and not to them. We do need to change our attitude and approach to it, and we do need to say that equality of opportunity is for everybody. The other problem with using the word is that it has been seen to mean equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity," she said.
"Using fairness as a word alongside equality will mean that the majority of the British people will start to see this is something that is about everybody, not something that is just available to specific groups of people."
The Guardian
