C. E. Lord OBE

There are many legitimate debates to be had about how government works.

How much regulation is too much? How should public services balance competing demands? When does process become bureaucracy? These are all fair questions.

What is not a serious contribution to that debate is Kemi Badenoch’s latest attack on the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED), which she has described as part of a wider culture of “institutionalised identity politics” and excessive bureaucracy.

I know this because, in 2013, I served on the Independent Steering Group established by the Coalition Government to review whether the Public Sector Equality Duty was operating as intended, as part of the Red Tape Challenge.

The Steering Group was chaired by Rob Hayward, now Lord Hayward, a respected Conservative politician. I was nominated by Liberal Democrat Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg to represent our side of the Coalition. The brief was not to promote equality activism but to examine whether the Duty worked and whether it imposed unnecessary burdens on public authorities.

If Badenoch had read the report carefully, she would discover something inconvenient.

The review did not recommend abolishing the Public Sector Equality Duty. It did not recommend repealing the Equality Act. Indeed, it found broad support for the principles behind the Duty and concluded that it was too early to make a final judgement on its effectiveness.

What it criticised was poor implementation; a distinction that matters.

What the Public Sector Equality Duty actually does

The Public Sector Equality Duty is often caricatured by its opponents. In reality, it imposes a remarkably modest obligation.

It does not require public authorities to achieve equal outcomes. It does not require quotas. It does not require positive discrimination. It does not require public bodies to prioritise equality over all other considerations.

It simply requires decision-makers to have “due regard” to three things when exercising their functions:

• eliminating unlawful discrimination;
• advancing equality of opportunity; and
• fostering good relations between different groups.

That is all.

The duty is procedural rather than substantive. It requires public bodies to think. It does not require them to reach any particular conclusion.

A council may still close a library. A government department may still cut a budget. A police force may still reorganise services.

The PSED merely requires them to understand who will be affected and whether reasonable steps can be taken to mitigate disproportionate impacts. In other words, it requires competent administration.

That should not be controversial.

The forgotten origins of the Duty

The origins of the PSED are not found in contemporary debates about diversity training or corporate DEI programmes.

They lie in the murder of Stephen Lawrence.

The first equality duty, covering race, emerged directly from the Macpherson Inquiry’s finding that public institutions needed to become more conscious of the ways their decisions affected different communities.

Subsequent duties relating to disability and gender followed. The Equality Act 2010 simply brought those separate duties together into a single framework. This was intended to simplify the law, not expand it.

Ironically, many of the people now demanding abolition are attacking a measure that was itself designed to reduce complexity.

What our Review actually found

The 2013 Review reached a nuanced conclusion. We found that implementation varied enormously across the public sector.

Some organisations had embedded equality considerations sensibly into their normal decision-making processes. Others had developed elaborate bureaucratic systems that added little value. We found examples of unnecessary Equality Impact Assessments. We found examples of excessive data collection. We found examples of procurement processes that imposed disproportionate burdens on contractors and voluntary organisations.

We criticised all of those things.

But we also found broad support for the principles underpinning the Duty.

Indeed, one of the central findings of the review was that the main challenges lay not in the legislation itself but in the way some organisations interpreted and implemented it.

The report warned against “gold-plating”. It called for clearer guidance. It urged public bodies to take a proportionate approach.

What it did not do was suggest that equality considerations should disappear from public decision-making altogether.

That would have been absurd.

Badenoch’s false choice

The weakness in Badenoch’s argument is that it presents a false choice.

Either we have the Public Sector Equality Duty and become trapped in bureaucracy, or we abolish it and liberate public services.

The real world is not that simple.

Every major public body already considers a range of factors when making decisions.

• Financial implications.
• Legal implications.
• Environmental implications.
• Health and safety implications.
• Operational implications.

Nobody suggests that these considerations should be abolished because some organisations occasionally apply them badly.

When a council produces a poor financial assessment, we do not conclude that financial assessments should cease to exist.

When a planning authority produces an excessively long report, we do not abolish planning law.

We improve the process.

Equality considerations should be treated in exactly the same way.

The strange Conservative conversion

What I find particularly curious is the extent to which some Conservatives now describe equality considerations as an alien imposition upon public administration. Historically, many of the principles embodied in the PSED would have been regarded as straightforward good governance.

Good decision-makers gather evidence.

Good decision-makers understand consequences.

Good decision-makers think before they act.

Good decision-makers consider who might be adversely affected by their choices.

These are not radical propositions. They are the foundations of competent public administration. Indeed, one could argue that the Public Sector Equality Duty is fundamentally conservative in nature.

It encourages caution.

It encourages evidence-based decision-making.

It encourages public authorities to think through consequences before acting.

Those are virtues traditionally associated with conservatism, or at least they used to be, but disappointingly no more.

What abolition would mean

The practical consequences of abolishing the PSED deserve much more attention than they have received.

The Duty does not create equality concerns. It reveals them. Removing the Duty would not make difficult equality issues disappear. It would simply mean that decision-makers are no longer required to consider them systematically.

The likely result would be poorer decisions, more avoidable mistakes, greater community tensions, and ultimately more litigation rather than less.

One of the most striking findings from our review was that many disputes were resolved before reaching court because public bodies engaged with affected communities at an early stage.

That engagement is not a bureaucratic burden. It is often a mechanism for avoiding conflict. Abolishing the Duty risks removing one of the incentives for that engagement.

Reform? Certainly. Repeal? No.

None of this means the current system is perfect. I have consistently argued that public bodies should adopt a proportionate approach. There is no virtue in collecting data that nobody uses. There is no virtue in producing lengthy reports that nobody reads. There is no virtue in treating equality compliance as a box-ticking exercise.

The answer, however, is reform:

It is clearer guidance.

It is better leadership.

It is greater proportionality.

It is less bureaucracy and more focus on outcomes.

Those were the conclusions we reached in 2013. They remain the right conclusions today.

The question Badenoch never answers

There is, however, a bigger political question that deserves to be asked. Why has the Public Sector Equality Duty suddenly become such a target?

Badenoch presents her campaign as a crusade against bureaucracy. Yet the PSED is only one small part of a much wider assault on equality, diversity, and inclusion initiatives that has emerged across the Anglosphere. We have seen it in the United States under Donald Trump. We have seen Republican-controlled state legislatures dismantling diversity programmes in universities and public institutions. We have seen attacks on anti-racism training, LGBTQ+ inclusion policies, and programmes designed to widen opportunity for historically underrepresented groups.

The Public Sector Equality Duty is now being drawn into the same ideological battle. And that should make us pause.

Given that the Duty merely requires decision-makers to ask questions and consider evidence before they act, why is even that seen as intolerable?

The answer, I suspect, is that equality duties challenge a political narrative that many populists increasingly depend upon.

If public bodies are required to consider evidence about discrimination, barriers to opportunity, or unequal outcomes, then it becomes harder to argue that such problems do not exist. If public authorities must examine how different groups experience public services, then simplistic explanations of social and economic change become more difficult to sustain.

The attack on the PSED is therefore not really about paperwork. It is about whether government should acknowledge that different people can experience the same policies in different ways.

What is being rejected is not bureaucracy. It is the very idea that structural inequality may exist and that public authorities should take it seriously.

The political appeal of this approach is obvious. It creates convenient enemies. “Woke officials”, “DEI managers”, “equality officers”, and “activists” become scapegoats for wider economic and social frustrations. Complex problems are reduced to culture-war slogans. Public anger is redirected away from questions of housing, healthcare, wages, public services, and economic inequality towards arguments about identity and symbolism.

But somebody always pays the price.

The people harmed are rarely the politicians leading the campaign. They are disabled people whose needs are overlooked in service redesign. They are ethnic minority communities whose experiences are ignored. They are women facing barriers in the workplace. They are LGBTQ+ people whose concerns are dismissed. They are religious minorities, older people, younger people, and many others whose voices are less likely to be heard when public authorities are no longer expected even to ask whether their decisions will affect them differently.

The Public Sector Equality Duty does not guarantee fairness. No law can do that. What it does guarantee is that public authorities stop, think, and ask the question. That is precisely why it matters.

And that is why those of us who believe in good government, evidence-based policy, and equal citizenship should defend it. Not because it is perfect. Not because it cannot be improved. But because a society that stops asking who is affected by its decisions is unlikely to become fairer, more cohesive, or more successful.

The answer to bad implementation is better implementation. The answer to bureaucracy is proportionality. The answer to poor guidance is better guidance. The answer is not to stop caring whether public policy works fairly for all our citizens.

Kemi Badenoch is simply wrong to attack the Public Sector Equality Duty, wrong to use EDI as a political football or a wedge issue that divides society. She’s just wrong.