Put the fight for equality at the heart of everything you do

TO: Labour’s next Leader

FROM: Maria Eagle

RE: Equality

I urge you to put the fight for equality at the heart of everything you do as you seek to learn the lessons of our defeat and equip us with the ideas and policies we need to win again.

Fighting unjustified discrimination, reducing inequality and developing the potential of all our people to the full is the key Labour value. It forms a bridge to our past. It is why our party was formed so it provides one of our best and surest building blocks for the future. You should:

– seek the reduction of inequality, year-on-year

– place increasing social mobility as a central aim of government

– require complete transparency on the gender pay gap

– call for a right to flexible working for all, rather than just a right to request

– allow parents to swap their leave entitlements to enable men to take part more fully in caring for their families

– prioritise funding for universal, affordable childcare

– prevent schools using admissions freedoms to exclude disadvantaged pupils.

Why equality?

We cannot have a good society or a fair society without reducing inequality. We cannot reach our potential as individuals without being able to develop our talents to the full and without society removing unfair barriers to our progress. We cannot reach our potential as a nation economically or socially without utilising the talents of all our people. To achieve this, we must eradicate unjustifiable discrimination, and also seek to tackle more subtle forms of discrimination that arise as a result of the way society is structured.

Labour governments have a great record over their time in office of legislating to outlaw discrimination and taking practical action to increase and equalise life chances in our society. With minor exceptions, only Labour has done this. The last Labour government contributed to that record by strengthening and deepening the legislative bulwark against discrimination by extending civil rights and promoting inclusion for disabled people, cracking down on the oppression and different treatment of LGB and T people and outlawing age discrimination amongst many other things. We should be proud of what we’ve done but it isn’t enough.

You should now focus on tackling the inequality that arises from the way in which our society is structured. Whilst men and women still do not share caring responsibilities, the gender pay gap and the crowding of women in to lower paying part time work can never be fully overcome and the structural aspects of gender inequality are likely to persist.

Whilst social background and parental occupation still determines life chances more effectively than intelligence, educational attainment and merit the child of poor, unemployed parents in an area of multiple deprivation can never expect to achieve what the child of a rich old Etonian finds easier.

The new government’s policy choices so far – abandoning school building programmes in deprived areas, loading two thirds of the cost of the budget cuts on women and disproportionately hitting poorer people confirm we are right to fear their impact on our society. Rapidly increasing inequality will be one major consequence of our having lost in 2010.

Inequality is still stubbornly present. It has more complex and subtle causes than we thought (See the analysis of the National Equality Panel “An Anatomy of Economic Inequality in the UK” January 2010). The lesson of our time in office is that we must develop more effective means of delivering results that remove the structural causes of gender and socio-economic inequality as well as outlawing unjustifiable discrimination.

We must focus on changing lives not just changing laws. You should:

– seek the reduction of inequality, year-on-year

– call for an annual audit which assesses whether women and people from lower socio-economic groups are becoming more or less equal, akin to the NEP analysis

– place increasing social mobility as a central aim of government and place it at the heart of policy across all departments and areas

– require complete transparency starting with publishing the gender pay gap in public and private sectors, backed up by powers in the Equality Act 2010

– seek to make flexible working the norm for everyone, with a right to flexible working for all, rather than just a right to request flexibility

– allow parents to swap their leave entitlements to enable men to take part more fully in caring for their families without a resulting financial penalty which makes it impractical.

Without universal, affordable childcare, there will never be equality for mothers or real choice for fathers and for families. You should be aiming to ensure that men see this as an issue for them. You should look at funding this as a priority commitment through a combination of extending child tax credits and expanding the sector through increased public, private and third sector provision jointly funded by income tax and employer provision, by men as well as women.

The Equality Act 2010 contains a duty on public sector policy makers to consider the impact of social background on individual life chances. It was a first tentative step in to the minefield of reducing the impact of social background on people’s lives. We must be bolder. As Hill’s analysis makes clear where a person is born and what their parents do for a living is a main determinant of their life chances. The impact starts early in life, is cumulative over the life cycle and intergenerational. It explains in part the dramatic silting up of social mobility highlighted by Alan Milburn’s report in to access to the Professions. We must use the infrastructure we created to focus relentlessly on these structural barriers to socio-economic and gender equality.

Sure Start is an essential building block but we must go and get the most disadvantaged involved. Effective outreach is essential. The Family Intervention Projects can help truly dysfunctional families change and they work.

We must have excellent schools in deprived areas. Schools must not be able to use admissions freedoms to exclude disadvantaged pupils. We must open up our universities and professions to recruit and facilitate access for diverse talent instead of using old familiar proxies for talent like postcode, parents occupation and material wellbeing. This can be done by creating more flexible pathways into the professions and upwards once in them. More diversity must be a mandated outcome.

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If we are to repair the damage it will do and move forward, tackling socio-economic inequality must be at the heart of all we do.

This memo, and the others in the series, were first published by the Open Left project at Demos