Tuesday 21 July 2009

The Panel On Fair Access To the Professions

The Panel on Fair Access to the professions has published its final report. Lead by the Rt Hon. Alan Milburn its 18 panel members examined the barriers and pathways to reaching professions for all people - regardless of their background.

The report was commissioned by the Prime Minister following the New Opportunities White Paper which examined the issue of social mobility and its importance for the economy and social justice, ensuring everyone has the chance to fulfil their potential and secure the jobs of the future.

The Panel on Fair Access to the Professions was announced on the 13th January 2009. The Panel will complement measures contained in the New Opportunities White Paper [External website].

The Panel will look at the processes and structures that govern recruitment into key professions. It will identify actions that the professions, supported by government where relevant, could undertake to improve access into professions.

The Panel will run until summer 2009 supported by a secretariat based in the Cabinet Office.

National Youth Survey for the Panel released

Fair Access: Good Practice paper released

The Panel on Fair Access to the Professions has published a Phase 2 report outlining the good practice currently underway to support fair access to the Professions.

This lays down a foundation to all the professions, as well as employers and the Government to rise to the challenge to now go further and faster in breaking down the practical barriers that stand in the way of talented young people across the country being able to realise their aspirations

Research paper released:

The Panel on Fair Access to the Professions has published a research paper highlighting key trends and issues in access to the Professions. The report identifies where progress had been made to widen access to the Professions for young people but also identifies where barriers still exist. for young people but also identifies where barriers still exist.

Meeting information

List of Panel Members

List of Panel Members [PDF 74KB,1 page]

Further details

This page will be regularly updated as the Panel’s work progresses.

You can contact The Panel on Fair Access to the Professions by email: access.professions@cabinet-office.x.gsi.gov.uk

or in writing at:

The Panel on Fair Access to the Professions
4.16, Admiralty Arch
The Mall
London
SW1A 2WH
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Trevor Phillips Has Been Condemned From Equality Watchdog Spending

EHRC spent almost £1m making staff redundant and then rehiring them.

Auditors delivered a searing rebuke to the Government's equalities commission yesterday for spending almost £1m on making senior staff redundant and then employing them again as "consultants".

Their findings add fuel to the argument over Harriet Harman's decision to reappoint Trevor Phillips, the high-profile chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), for a second term in office.

Though it was not Mr Phillips's personal responsibility to hire staff, a former commissioner, who has worked with Mr Phillips for a number of years, said yesterday that the seven staff taken on improperly were people he knew well.

"If he didn't know what was going on then he is a hopeless chair, in my view," Kay Hampton, who resigned from the new Commission in April, said.

Yesterday's report from the National Audit Office, which watches over public spending, focused on the summer and autumn of 2007, when three government bodies – for racial equality, sex discrimination and disability rights – were wound up and absorbed into the new super commission, with over 400 staff and a £70m budget, chaired by Mr Phillips.

More than £11m was paid out in redundancy to staff who did not want to move from the old quangos to the new. But in the run up to October 2007, when the new commission was due to start operations, it was short of 140 staff and 15 out of 25 directors.

Seven staff from the old Commission for Racial Equality, which Trevor Phillips headed in 2003-06, were hired as consultants, despite having just accepted large redundancy cheques. Yesterday's report said there was no evidence there was even a gap between when they left one job and moved into another, but they were not asked to pay back their severance money.

One had received £104,125, and was taken back on for 11 months and paid fees totalling £105,216. In all, it cost £629,276 to make the seven staff redundant, and £323,708 to re-employ them. That decision should have been cleared with the Treasury, who did not find out until later and refused to approve it.

Kay Hampton was Mr Phillips's deputy at the former Commission for Racial Equality, and headed it for 10 months until it went out of existence. She was a commissioner on the EHRC until she resigned in April. Five out of 14 commissioners have resigned in two months, and two more are expected to quit this week. Several have complained about Mr Phillips's management style.

"Although Trevor Phillips and I have been friends at one point – and were colleagues for many years – and I don't care about his leadership style, I have to say that these were people who were handpicked by Trevor in the CRE," she said yesterday.

"I'm not surprised by the issues raised in the National Audit Office report. I picked up on some of these issues while I was still there. It reached the point where, for my own personal integrity, I was not going to be associated with the accounts. I'm very pleased that the accounts were qualified. The public deserves to know the truth."

Mr Phillips and his senior staff will face a grilling by the Commons' Public Accounts committee when MPs return from their summer break.

"Poor management and oversight following its creation resulted in EHRC being understaffed and unprepared," the committee chairman, Edward Leigh, said yesterday. "The total cost to the taxpayer of paying off these executives only to bring them back as consultants was almost £1m. The Treasury, when it found out that public money had been used in this way, refused to approve the payments."

Mr Phillips's defenders say that as a non-executive chairman, he did not personally hire staff, and the officials who did have since left.

"Of course it's terrible to get your first set of accounts qualified by the National Audit Office," one said. "But this was a time when they were trying to get a £70m operation up and running, and there was a feeling that they had done well just to get the place open on time."
Harriet Harman's decision to reappoint Mr Phillips last week came as a surprise and provoked three commissioners to resign over the weekend. It was rumoured that Mr Phillips might carry on for a short time before being given a peerage and made a minister, but he has accepted his reappointment and indicated that he means to serve another full, three-year term.

What is the EHRC?

The Commission for Equality and Human Rights was set up by an Act of Parliament in 2006, to replace three bodies – the Commission on Racial Equality, the Disability Rights Commission, and the Equal Opportunities Commission. It has 410 full-time staff, and employs about 120 agency staff at any time – slightly fewer than the 620 people working for the three commissions it replaced.

It is run by a board which, until April, was made up of the chairman, Trevor Phillips, his deputy, Margaret Prosser, and 14 commissioners. Mr Phillips and Mrs Prosser had their terms of office renewed last week, but Harriet Harman told the commissioners they must reapply for their jobs, and that there will be fewer of them. Five have resigned since April and two more are likely to go.

As well as upsetting some people by management style, Mr Phillips has caused controversy through his strategy for combatting discrimination, dealing with human rights as a whole rather than on racism, sexism etc. as discrete issues. He created waves by criticising multiculturalism, a cause which many anti-racist campaigners hold dear.

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Xinjiang To 'Crack Down' On Separatism

It is high time that the Chinese Communist Party revisit the past as a form of lesion the Provence of Xinjiang and listen to the Urumqi people and Tibet people. Instead of calling the ethnic Chinese people as Separatists

Chinese state media has reported that Xinjiang's regional congress is speeding up the passage of laws against separatism in light of the deadly violence that rocked Urumqi earlier this month.

Xinhua quoted Xinjiang Regional People's Congress standing committee chairman Eligen Imibakhi as saying that Xinjiang legislators are working on a raft of laws that would "provide legal assistance to Xinjiang's anti-secession struggle and the cracking down on violence and terrorism."

Mr Imibakhi blamed the July 5 riots, in which nearly 200 died, on extremism, separatism and terrorism, both at home and abroad.

He said that the public's lack of understanding of the laws that are already in place is an "urgent problem," adding that the government plans to distribute legal booklets in ethnic minority languages to farmers and herdsmen across the region.

China already has a national law against secession, though there are no similar regional laws.

Investigators have determined that rioters had stockpiled weapons and planned synchronised attacks across Urumqi.

Targets included the offices of the Xinjiang regional committee of the Communist Party, the public security and fire departments and media organisations.
Xinhua cited the local security department as saying that most rioters were from outside Urumqi.

The news agency reported that Chinese businesses, public institutions and individuals have so far donated over 270 million yuan (£24m) to the Ethnic Unity Fund, which has been set up by the Xinjiang regional administration to aid those injured or bereaved in the riot.
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