Kemi Badenoch is right to argue that the Public Sector Equality Duty should go – and I say that as someone who used to help police it. Her wider point in today’s speech at the Institute for Government is even more important: not every disparity in outcome is proof of racism, and we have built an entire bureaucratic religion on pretending that it is.
On paper, the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED) looks innocuous. It tells public bodies that, when exercising their functions, they must have ‘due regard’ to eliminating discrimination, advancing equality of opportunity and fostering good relations between people with and without protected characteristics such as race, sex, disability or religion. These are sensible aims – and they are already hard‑wired into the Equality Act’s core prohibitions on direct and indirect discrimination, harassment and victimisation.
In practice, the PSED has morphed from a reminder not to discriminate into a dogma that treats any difference in group outcomes as evidence of structural injustice. Officials are pushed to comb through data for disparities and then reverse‑engineer policies to equalise statistical endpoints, regardless of underlying causes or trade‑offs. Instead of asking, ‘Is this decision fair, lawful and effective?’, they are trained to ask, ‘How will this look in an equality impact assessment?’
