Pushing the socio-economic duty up the hill

Welcome (and long overdue) planned legislation, requiring UK public authorities to consider the impacts of policy decisions on socio-economic inequality, faces an uphill struggle

The government is planning to enact Section 1 of the Equality Act, 15 years after the main piece of legislation. This is the ‘socio-economic duty’, which requires governments and certain types of local authority to consider how their strategic decisions (such as setting objectives and deciding priorities in areas such as education, health or housing) “might help to reduce the inequalities associated with socio-economic disadvantage”.

This is great news, and long overdue. As we’ve argued in various reports focused on wealth inequality, socio-economic inequality more broadly, the opportunity mission and long-term thinking, it’s critical that UK policymakers treat tackling socio-economic inequality as a priority, recognising the extent to which it damages our society, economy, democracy and environment (leaving aside the moral and political arguments for action). Embedding the requirement to consider the implications for socio-economic inequality in strategic decision-making has the potential to be transformative, if done well, as 1ForEquality, Just Fair and many others have argued. Early evidence from Scotland and Wales, and from its voluntary use in some local authorities in England, lends weight to this assertion.

The phrase “if done well” is doing a lot of work here. A huge amount is riding on how the duty is both designed and implemented – in legislation and guidance, and by the public authorities that are putting it into practice. The Cabinet Office have recently run a call for evidence on the implementation of the socio-economic duty alongside various other equality measures. They will have received plenty of suggestions from people much more qualified than us about how to make it work and how to avoid it becoming a box-ticking exercise.

However, it seems to us that one of the biggest problems is completely outside the scope of the consultation exercise, because it has nothing to do with the design and implementation of the socio-economic duty itself. The problem is that perennial old chestnut, joined-up government (or its absence). Choose your metaphor - pushing a boulder up hill, or closing the stable after the horse has bolted, or trying to put out a forest fire with a water can. Policymakers in central and local government can be doing their utmost to follow the spirit and the letter of the legislation, but they may well get nowhere because other government policies are working – much harder – in exactly the opposite direction.

Just as employers or universities who are trying to attract more applicants from disadvantaged groups struggle to compensate for the scale of socio-economic (and other forms of) inequality through access schemes, apprenticeships and so on, so public authorities (including central government departments) are likely to be held back in their attempts to reduce socio-economic inequalities by forces outside their control that are making those inequalities worse.

Here are just three obvious ways in which policymaking in government works to exacerbate rather than ameliorate socio-economic disadvantage:

• The persistent political prioritisation of the interests of wealthier groups (including the extremely wealthy, but also the ‘ordinarily wealthy’ group of mostly older homeowners) over the interests of those with less wealth (all of whom are, by definition, ‘socio-economically disadvantaged’ relative to the first group), which is exacerbated by lobbying and political donations by the extremely wealthy but owes just as much to the real or perceived voting power of the ordinarily wealthy

• The prioritisation of economic growth over all other policy goals, based on the questionable assumption that growth must come before tackling inequality, because it will generate more taxes to support public services and so on, as evidenced for example by the growth duty on regulators (whereas we argue that reducing inequality is a precondition to achieving sustainable and stable growth, and that inclusive growth is both more necessary and more feasible than growth that largely benefits the already-wealthy)

• Decisions to cut social security spending in order to meet self-imposed fiscal rules, regardless of the immediate impacts on poverty and socio-economic inequality and of the long-term damage that these cuts will do to our society and economy

In the face of these headwinds, even a large central government department – let alone a local authority – would struggle to meaningfully “reduce any socio-economic inequalities through their decision making”, unless they are the Treasury. The socio-economic duty only requires public authorities to “determine” whether they can reduce socio-economic inequalities, rather than requiring them to do whatever they can do to reduce them¹. But even if the duty required going all in on inequalities, most public authorities would find that they had limited powers to do much about them in the absence of a concerted push to tackle socio-economic inequality across government that addressed the several elephants in the room outlined above.

No doubt the socio-economic duty will see some genuine progress made in some areas. The risk is that, because it is pushing in the opposite direction to the overall trajectory of government policy, these wins will be superficial, fragmented and temporary. It’s telling that, in its consultation document, the government gives the following example of the impact of the voluntary adoption of the duty by Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service (MFRS) in 2021:

As a result of using the duty the MFRS realised that individuals experiencing socio-economic disadvantage were underrepresented in firefighter applications due to the requirement to have a driving licence. They removed the driving licence requirement for prospective firefighters and now offer bursaries for successful applicants from 20 deprived areas of Merseyside. This led to an additional 195 applications in 2022, 48 per cent of which came from the 10 per cent most deprived areas of Merseyside.

That’s a useful innovation, and a good example of a well-placed nudge to change policies in ways that can help to overcome disadvantage and inequality. The problem is that it’s progress despite the fact that overall levels of disadvantage and inequality are on the increase. We shouldn’t kid ourselves that this legislation is going to do a huge amount to reduce the underlying inequalities, even if it helps a range of public bodies to do a better job of compensating for them. And there’s an additional danger, that the future emergence of lots of these examples thanks to the duty creates the impression that more action is being taken to tackle socio-economic inequality than is actually the case. A bit like how ‘rags-to-riches’ stories of social mobility falsely reassure us that we live in a meritocratic society where “you can make it if you try”.

To be clear, this isn’t an argument against enacting the socio-economic duty. Far from it. This legislation is necessary and a useful building block. But unless and until the government shows a greater willingness to tackle socio-economic inequality, taxing and spending and investing and regulating where necessary, and to prioritise this alongside or even above other outcomes (recognising that many of them depend on reducing inequality), it will only scratch the surface of what is needed. Every step forward towards a less unequal society that comes from the enactment of the socio-economic duty will be accompanied by ten steps back as a result of policy decisions made elsewhere in government. And that’s not going to help anyone.

1. The full text of the relevant paragraph of the legislation is: “An authority to which this section applies must, when making decisions of a strategic nature about how to exercise its functions, have due regard to the desirability of exercising them in a way that is designed to reduce the inequalities of outcome which result from socio-economic disadvantage.”