It is no secret that the public sector is having to review the way it delivers services to reduce budgets. ImpactEquality, our online equality impact assessment tool has again proved to be an invaluable resource in assessing the implications of this restructuring. Often it is the most disadvantaged who most affected so a prompt and [...]
Building a Fairer Britain – Making it Happen
The Equality Strategy released last week is to be welcomed. The real challenge is for the public sector to make it happen. By remarkable coincidence ‘Making it Happen’ is one of the core principles of the strategy. The light touch pragmatic monitoring is especially welcome but must not be used by organisations to avoid full [...]
Fawcett challenge fails
The High Court has refused permission to the Fawcett Society to challenge the legality of the government’s emergency budget. The challenge was on the grounds of discrimination against women as they would bear the brunt of the cuts. The challenge was perhaps doomed to fail as it is not clear what the remedy would have been. [...]
Launch of African Igloos
The new book for public service heroes is published this week by Wingfast Publishing Ltd. Available on Amazon, in bookshops, or directly from Black Radley.
Ten Top Tips for Big Society
The Prime Minister has described the concept of Big Society as: “… a guiding philosophy… a society where the leading force for progress is social responsibility, not state control…[and where] … government [is] more accountable.” The objective is clear and correct, so the challenge is not to define ‘Big Society’, but how to achieve it. So how does political rhetoric become practical reality? Peter Latchford sets out ten key guidelines.
Equality Impact Assessments on budget cuts
The recent intervention by Theresa May is interesting and not without foundation The law requires most public bodies including central government to carry out an impact assessment to identify whether any decision might disadvantage people purely because they were from certain groups. These groups include people with disabilities, people from different ethnic backgrounds or men [...]
Fairness Framework
This brief document is part of a major piece of work on fairness and identity, led by Black Radley and Simon Fanshawe, and supported by a wide range of public sector organisations across the UK. The outputs from this work include networks of like minded organisations, at the most senior level, and methodologies to support the effective use of the framework
Policing Cuts
Budget cuts are a certainty for the police. The question now is, how should they be implemented? Is there a way of reducing police resource which minimises the impact on front line effectiveness? Standard budget cutting approaches will not work: they tend to focus on cutting out “non-core” activities such as relationship or neighbourhood based approaches, reducing “non-essential” items, such as training budgets, and requiring managers to implement an across the board reduction by a given percentage. Peter Latchford outlines an alternative perspective.
