Equality
by Christopher McCrudden
The inclusive, broad and radical-sounding nature of the initiative raised expectations that proved difficult to satisfy in practice. Unlike the equivalent guidelines in the rest of the United Kingdom, the PAFT guidelines were available from government on request and were widely circulated by NGOs among the relevant groups. Perhaps naively, they took the PAFT guidelines at face value, expected fairness, and behaved accordingly. When the promise was not delivered, unsurprisingly, they mobilised. The guidelines were soon embroiled in public controversy. Unison, the public sector trade union, took judicial review proceedings against one of the public bodies that intended to privatise its services on the grounds that to do so discriminated against women. The judicial review was ultimately unsuccessful, but two things emerged. First, the PAFT guidelines had not formally been issued to the public body concerned, which was a considerable embarrassment for the government. Second, the court held that, had the guidelines been issued properly, the public body would have been legally required to take them into account. This appeared to give the guidelines a legal status, something that had hitherto not been clear.
It became clear later, however, that while departments had to take the guidelines into account, once they did so, it would be difficult to contest their decision legally, whatever the result of that consideration - in short that PAFT was legally enforceable procedurally, but not substantively. However, the effect of all this was to raise the political status of the guidelines in the eyes of both the public bodies and departments to which they applied and the campaigning groups. In a sustained attempt to encourage groups to use the guidelines, the Committee on the Administration of Justice (CAJ), a Northern Ireland human rights NGO, organised briefing sessions on the guidelines for a range of interested voluntary and community organisations. The NGOs responded with enthusiasm. A loose coalition was born that was dedicated to putting PAFT into effect.
Meanwhile, another factor played an important role in making PAFT a major focus of political interest. During the passage of the Fair Employment Act 1989, the government committed itself to conducting a formal review of the operation of the legislation and other government policy in this area within five years of its commencement. Originally, this task was given to the CCRU within the Northern Ireland Office, the government department responsible for Northern Ireland, but responsibility was later transferred to SACHR. SACHR commissioned research into several areas of government policy as part of its enquiry. Particularly important among this research was a short but highly critical piece on the operation of PAFT, which showed that PAFT appeared to be largely ignored by substantial sections of the policy-making apparatus of government.5 Increasingly, the focus of political attention shifted from concern about the operation of the Fair Employment Act narrowly conceived, to the ineffectiveness of the policy that had been seen as a necessary complement to the legislation - PAFT.
1 Northern Ireland Information Service, 1987. "Secretary of State takes Direct Responsibility for Community Relations Matters" 8 September 1987.
2 McCrudden supra n. 5.
3 Central secretariat Circular, 1990. Equal Opportunity Proofing: Guidelines, January 1990.
4 Central Secretariat Circular, 1993. Policy Appraisal and Fair Treatment, May 1993.
5 Robert Osborne, Anthony Gallagher, and Robert Cormack, with Sally Shortall,
1996. 'The implementation of the policy appraisal and fair treatment guidelines
in Northern Ireland', pp. 127-52 in Eithne McLaughlin and Padraic Quirk,
(eds.), Policy Aspects of Employment Equality in Northern Ireland [Employment
Equality in Northern Ireland Series, vol. 2] (Belfast: Standing Advisory
Commission on Human Rights). |
