Government launches landmark "Inclusive Britain" strategy

• New measures announced today include policing reforms, targeted support for children at risk, a new Model History Curriculum, and action on the ethnicity pay gap;

• Latest major step in delivering the Government’s Levelling Up agenda.

Today (17 March) the Government will publish its landmark Inclusive Britain strategy to tackle racial and ethnic disparities and ensure fairness in the UK. This strategy builds on the Levelling Up White Paper which provides the blueprint for spreading opportunity more equally across the country.

Inclusive Britain was developed in response to the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities’ ground-breaking independent report which made 24 recommendations to tackle ethnic disparities. Inclusive Britain addresses every single one of these recommendations and goes further, setting out a detailed Action Plan to build a fairer and more inclusive society in the long-term. 

Minister of State for Equalities Kemi Badenoch said:

“The Inclusive Britain Action Plan sets out how we are going to tackle the racial and ethnic disparities that persist in the UK. We have laid out more than 70 concrete actions which will practically improve people’s lives. I strongly believe that Britain is the fairest and most open-minded country in the world, but there is more we can do to foster inclusion and enable everyone to reach their full potential.

“We are building trust through improving police scrutiny, promoting fairness in the workplace with new evidence-based resources that work, tackling serious youth violence which disproportionately affects certain communities, and fostering inclusion by designing a new Model History Curriculum telling the story of the making of modern Britain.

“The causes behind racial disparities are complex and often misunderstood. Our new strategy is about action, not rhetoric and will help create a country where a person’s race, social or ethnic background is no barrier to achieving their ambitions.”

Chair of the Commission for Race and Ethnic Disparities Tony Sewell said:

“When the Commission began its work in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, we set out to examine the evidence and root causes for the disparities faced particularly by ethnic minorities and offer solutions to the Government to address them. The Government’s response, Inclusive Britain, does just that.

“This is a major step towards a fairer, more open and more inclusive society and, importantly, focuses on the practical actions that will improve people’s lives. We all should throw our weight behind this strategy so we can build a better society for all.”

Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Michael Gove said:

“Central to Levelling Up is equality – giving everyone the same access to a great education, a well-paid job and a good standard of living – regardless of their background.

“The Inclusive Britain Action Plan is fundamental to our ambitions, helping us tackle the root-causes of racial disparities and ensure equality of opportunity for all.”

The Inclusive Britain Action Plan sets out 70 practical actions to tackle the negative disparities that persist in our society under three key themes identified by the commission - Building Trust, Promoting Fairness, and Creating Agency - as well as a number of measures that go beyond the Commission’s recommendations. These include:

• Working with a new panel of academics and business people to promote fairness in the workplace;
• Creating a new Office for Health Improvement and Disparities which is now working to improve health for everyone – accepting a key Commission recommendation;
• Developing a new, national framework for how the use of police powers, such as stop and search, are scrutinised at a local level in order to enhance trust and strengthen relations between police forces and the communities they serve;
• Piloting an automatic ‘opt-in’ to help ethnic minorities and others receive the legal advice they need when in police custody;
• Issuing guidance to employers on how to measure and report on differences in ethnicity pay so businesses can identify and address disparities;
• Publishing a new White Paper on tackling health disparities to ensure we have a plan in place to help everyone live longer, healthier and happier lives;
• Setting out our plan for boosting literacy and numeracy standards for the most disadvantaged pupils in our forthcoming schools white paper;
• Developing regulatory standards and guidance to address potential racial bias in AI so that everyone is able to benefit from the new AI economy;
• Deploying a new in-work support offer to every Jobcentre from April 2022 with 37 new specialist Progression Champions to support working claimants to climb the career ladder, tackling ethnic pay disparities;

• Working with industry to collect data on ethnicity of business owners applying for finance, plus a new HSBC scheme to support more ethnic minorities to become entrepreneurs;

• Improving adoption matching for children of ethnic minority backgrounds with a new approach to data sharing and collection, and a Children’s Commissioner led review into support for families;

• Empowering more grassroots, ethnic minority-led and specialist, voluntary or community sector organisations to provide rehabilitative services.

• Reforming public sector training on diversity and inclusion to ensure it is more evidence-based, impartial and inclusive;

• Preventing young people entering a cycle of crime by using more out of court disposals to deal with first time drug users and therefore freeing up more police time to pursue criminal gangs supplying drugs;
• Introducing our ground-breaking Online Safety Bill to clamp down on abhorrent racist abuse online.

Inclusive Britain is a rallying cry for the rest of the public sector - as well as business, charities, or individuals, to work towards achieving a society which is truly equal. The Government has already delivered on a number of the pledges included in the Inclusive Britain Action Plan, and work has already begun on all other measures.

These include:

• Further demonstrating our commitment to families - via boosting funding to the Supporting Families programme by 40 per cent in real terms. This has brought funding up to to £695 million from 2022 to 2025 as well as new funding to provide family hubs in 75 local authorities.
• Trialling schemes to divert young people away from the criminal justice system - via projects such as project ADDER. 
• Launching the new Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID) to focus on action in society to prevent disparities emerging in the first place.

The full Inclusive Britain Strategy will be published on GOV.UK and the report produced by the independent Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities can be found [here].

ENDS

NOTES TO EDITORS

New actions being announced today include:

• Action 3: To improve our understanding of online harms, the Race Disparity Unit (RDU) will engage with service providers, international organisations and experts to better measure and monitor online abuse. This programme of work will also consider how specific events, such as high-profile football matches, can act as instigators for online abuse.

• Action 4: To improve online transparency, RDU will lead a review into online misinformation to better understand how different groups are accessing and interpreting information online. The review will provide a series of data and policy recommendations to strengthen the government’s understanding and ability to tackle online abuse.

• Action 6: To ensure more responsible and accurate reporting on race and ethnicity, the RDU will by the end of 2022 consult on new standards for government departments and other public bodies on how to record, understand and communicate ethnicity data.

• Action 9: To identify and fill evidence gaps about the social mobility, skill and role mismatching and health outcomes of immigrants, the RDU will lead a new cross-government analytical work programme with input from external experts in 2022. This will include analysis of the structural issues that immigrants may face in the UK, and understanding the lessons that the government has learned about policy making in this area.

• Action 10: The police need the powers to tackle crime - but there also needs to be effective local scrutiny of these powers in order to enhance trust and strengthen relations between police and communities. The Home Office, with policing partners including Police and Crime Commissioners,  will develop by summer 2023 a new, national framework for how the use of police powers - including stop and search and use of force - are scrutinised at a local level. This framework will ensure that local scrutiny panels are independently led, reflect the diversity of the areas they represent and give police the confidence to use their powers with the backing of local communities

• Action 14: To give greater clarity and context to stop and search data, and reassure the public about its use, the RDU will work with the Home Office, Office for Statistics Regulation and Office for National Statistics (ONS) to improve the way this data is reported and to enable more accurate comparisons to be made between different police force areas.

• Action 30: DfE and the RDU will investigate the strategies used by the multi-academy trusts who are most successful at bridging achievement gaps for different ethnic groups and raising overall life chances. The lessons learnt will be published in 2022 and will help drive up standards for all pupils

• Action 40: To ensure that ethnic minorities and others receive the legal advice they need when in police custody, the MoJ will support a number of police forces to trial the effect of an automatic ‘opt-in’ to receive independent advice over 2022 and to build trust to see if this reduces disparities. This will assess whether better advice could lead to improved outcomes following arrest, such as better protection of vulnerable individuals, and increased take up of out of court disposals.

• Action 53: To help disadvantaged students to choose the right courses for them and to boost their employment prospects, the Social Mobility Commission will seek to improve the information available to students about the labour market value of qualifications and, where possible, the impact of those qualifications on social mobility.

• Action 57: To help pupils understand the intertwined nature of British and global history, and their own place within it, the DfE will work with history curriculum experts, historians and school leaders to develop a Model History curriculum by 2024 that will stand as an exemplar for a knowledge-rich, coherent approach to the teaching of history. The Model History Curriculum will support high-quality teaching and help teachers and schools to develop their own school curriculum fully using the flexibility and freedom of the history national curriculum and the breadth and depth of content it includes. The development of model knowledge-rich curriculums continues the path of reform the government started in 2010.

• Action 58: The DfE will actively seek out and signpost to schools suggested high-quality resources to support teaching all-year round on black history in readiness for Black History Month October 2022. This will help support schools to share the multiple, nuanced stories of the contributions made by different groups that have made this country the one it is today. 

• Action 69: To tackle bias and ensure fairness in the workplace, by spring 2023 the Equality Hub will create an ‘Inclusion at Work Panel’. Made up of a panel of academics and practitioners in business to develop and disseminate effective resources to help employers drive fairness across organisations. This will go beyond just race and ethnicity to identify actions to promote fairness for all in the workplace and will include a programme of research and workplace trials to provide a robust evidence base and root out poor quality training

• Action 70: To support employers and industry sectors to create opportunity for groups that are underrepresented in their workforce, the Government Equalities Office will create new updated guidance on positive action by December 2022.

The government did not wait to act until the formal response to the Commission for Race and Ethnic Disparities was published. Other actions referenced in the Inclusive Britain Action Plan came following the Sewell Commission’s report.