Relación de las teorías

In common with County Council and City Council day to day responsibility for assessing the equality impact of policies rested with the team or department

responsible for developing those policies. The equality officers and the Director were clear in interviews that their role was to help and support colleagues rather than do the work themselves:

Broadly, the majority of stuff is we are meant to be there to help people a bit but to be independent. They are meant to do most of this stuff themselves (Equality officer).

The Director saw this approach as part of making equality a ‘day to day’ issue, ‘part of the job’. Although she did not use the term ‘mainstreaming’, her description of the need to ensure consideration of equality was part of the process of policy

development from an early stage appeared to fit with a mainstreaming model. With shrinking council resources leading to job losses in the equalities team, making those responsible for developing a particular policy consider its equality impact was also a practical necessity. The size of the equality team (four people also responsible for policy), meant that it would have been very difficult for them to carry out impact assessments themselves even if they had wanted to.

Despite their repeated insistence on the strong commitment to equality throughout London Borough, equality officers did not see the process of mainstreaming as straightforwardly unproblematic. They were all open about the generally ‘mixed’ and sometimes ‘poor’ quality of impact assessments carried out by colleagues outside the team. The Director responsible for equalities admitted that there was

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often a gap between high level policy commitments to equality and practice on the ground:

Say if you were an inspector, I would tell you that we are very clear, we’ve got corporate priorities, within that we have analysed what the inequalities are within our corporate priorities as part of our equality objectives and that trickles through to the organisation into practice on the ground. [….]. In reality there is quite a lot of struggle around some specific areas and to get the consistency of practice (Director).

However proposed solutions to this problem varied significantly and could be

divided into two broad groups. One group of solutions might be described as broadly bureaucratic, focussing on improved processes to ensure people met their legal obligations. The other approach focussed on making a stronger case for equality in order to win ‘hearts and minds’, using the PSED as a tool to enforce compliance where this was not possible. Among those with a bureaucratic approach one officer explicitly argued that

There is a need for more bureaucracy in the way we do things a lot of the time because of the slap dash way that people generally operate. (Equality officer).

He also emphasised the lack of expertise among many of his colleagues in dealing with equality, which he believed was a complex area. In contrast the Director

appeared focussed on outcomes, arguing that the problem was too much bureaucracy which did not ‘speak to people’s good intentions’:

It is not that people don’t have good intentions, but they can’t… you have to try to enable them to see the connection between what might seem like a bureaucratic process. […]I think one of the problems with this whole agenda is that equality professionals have generally done a dis-service to equality because they have so bureaucratised it [….]people’s natural good intentions with what they are doing would have a greater effect than to produce grids and all sorts of things (Director).

She saw the expertise of the equalities team as a double edged sword. Used correctly it could be a resource to enable others to understand the equality impact of their

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work; used incorrectly it could act as a barrier to change. These difference in attitudes between her and the equality officer were also observable in their attitudes to the PSED. The officer with the ‘bureaucratic’ approach described the PSED as ‘necessary’ in order to improve evidence based policy making arguing that ‘equality legislation has to be bureaucratic’. The Director also saw the PSED as ‘necessary’ but emphasised its role as a lever for change, describing a ‘carrot and stick’ approach of winning hearts and minds and strategically using the threat of judicial review when necessary. In common with all the officers and councillors at London Borough she felt that the actual risk of judicial review was low, since most civil society organisations lacked the resources or knowledge to use the law. Nevertheless where it was not possible to win support for work through a ‘hearts and minds’ approach she used the fear of judicial review in order to persuade colleagues to act:

All in all it [the PSED] is weak, but none the less what I would see as part of my job is to give people within the organisation the impression that it has more teeth than it has, to be honest, you know I would see that as part of my job (Director).

She was the only council officer in London Borough who described using this tactic, although as I will show it was used by some officers in all three case study

authorities, and by some of the equality officers from outside the case study areas. The division between officers focussed on bureaucratic process and officers focussed on outcomes was common across all case study authorities. In London Borough and the other two authorities the officers focussed on process appeared similar to the ‘diversity professionals’ described by Kirton Green and Dean (2007), in that they came from other posts within the authority rather than a background in equality activism. In all three authorities this use of the threat of judicial review as a lever for change was one characteristic of officers with an ‘outcome focussed’ approach who combined commitments to a ‘long’ agenda of transformation with a focus on short term objectives; a pattern similar to that observed by Cockburn (1989). This division and its implications will be discussed in more detail in the analysis at the end of the case studies.

In London Borough other council officers mentioned the fears that some of their colleagues had about the risk of judicial review but did not appear to see their role as

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using these fears in order to bring about change. In one case an equality officer talked at some length about how he calmed colleagues’ fears by pointing out that people were unlikely to bring judicial review. This suggests that the tactic used by the Director was a personal one, rather than something she had encouraged the equality team to use.