A number of cities – from Plymouth to Sheffield to York – have held fairness commissions in recent years to understand why entrenched inequalities persist. As useful and, in some cases, penetrating as these commissions have been they have tended to ignore the nuts and bolts of how public agencies ‘do’ equality – how they go about tackling discrimination, eradicating social patterns of disadvantage, and fulfilling their legislative equalities duties. This is a serious gap. Understanding why these approaches have failed may go some way to explain why serious inequalities continue.
This report tries to fill that gap by:
exploring how one city – Birmingham – has approached equalities issues over the last 30 years
trying to sketch the impact of these approaches
suggesting how we can do things differently in the future
You can download the report here.