It’s just as well that Nicola Brewer, head of the government’s new equality
body, does not want an easy life. Just five weeks into her job as chief
executive of the Commission for Equality and Human Rights (CEHR) she knows
she is not going to get one. She is working out of a temporary office, has
no permanent staff and just finding a stash of paper- clips and a ballpoint
pen that works seems to be a challenge. “There’s just me and my PA at the
moment,” she says.
Not for long. She is shopping for staff. “We open for business in October,”
she adds, referring to the new equality watchdog that is taking shape under
her £180,000-a-year command. Candidates for jobs in the super- triumvirate,
which replaces the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), the Equal
Opportunities Commission and the Disability Rights Commission, are being
sought. With a budget of £70m a year, the CEHR will be the largest
organisation of its kind in the world.
The “superquango”, set up in the wake of the 2006 Equality Act
that comes into force this autumn, will bring together expertise on
equality, diversity and human rights in one place. It will either be a
one-stop shop for a fair deal for the most vulnerable people in our society
or a politically correct meddlers’ charter, depending on your point of view.
Will it prove a superquango or a leviathan, gobbling squillions out of the
public purse? As Brewer points out: “There are huge expectations of this
organisation.”
And of Brewer. Her former colleagues at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office
(FCO), where she has worked as a diplomat for more than 20 years, have
described her as “dynamic”, but Brewer puts it differently. She calls
herself “bolshie” and “bloody-minded . . . but not just for the sake of it,
I hope”.
In her new incarnation she will help Trevor Phillips, the former head of the
CRE who will be chairman of the new organisation, in moulding the style and
substance of the nascent body. “This is like a start-up and a merger,” she
says of her blank slate.
What will she write on it? Given that so many freedoms have already been won,
is there a place for an overarching CEHR in the 21st century? Do we need it?
After all, we live in a world that is barely recognisable from the 1970s
when the Sex Discrimination Act came into force.
The buzz words of migration and multiculturalism trip off the tongue. We are
increasingly familiar with the concepts of work/life balance, family
friendly policies, civil partnerships and politically correct language, much
of it risible.
Statistics show that two-thirds of mothers with dependent children work, 55%
of them with children under five. Thirty years ago only half of mothers with
dependent children worked and only 25% of women with children under five
were in employment. Women’s lives have been transformed.
Brewer warns us against complacency. “One of the groups that persistently
suffers discrimination is women with children,” she says briskly. Her
remarks are backed up by the Equalities Review, a government report chaired
by Phillips, which published its findings in February.
Females, as the plight of Faye Turney, the military hostage, has reminded us,
increasingly go to war for long periods. The fact that Leading Seaman
Turney, 26, had a three-year-old daughter, she adds, merits scrutiny.
Perhaps the daughter had rights, too: “Opportunities are opening up for
women in a way that could not have been foreseen. We need to look at all
these issues, not because there is an easy answer but because they raise
difficult questions.”
Come on, I say, no evasive diplomatic answers today. What else does she think
needs to be done? “We need to look at the whole issue of what happens to
parents in the early years of their children’s lives. At present careers are
very linear, but that doesn’t work well for mothers with young kids. We
can’t afford as a nation for them not to be at work.
We need to bring in things like annualised hours, where parents can work
flexibly so long as they do their contracted amount. More homeworking, of
course.
“But most importantly we need to bring about a revolution in the way that
fathers see all of this. Many more mothers now work flexibly — we need to
remove the stigma from fathers and give them the same kind of rights so that
they can work flexibly, too.”
Families around Britain might cheer at that but many businesses will groan at
the thought of more concessions. Yet Brewer is not just talking the talk.
Her own path to the top has been circuitous, veering from FCO fast-track to
mummy-track. She is married to fellow diplomat Geoffrey Gillham, and their
two children, Angharad and Rhodri, are 13 and 12. When they were very young
she gave up one plum job that involved much shuttling between London and the
European parliament.
“My daughter sat down one evening and pleaded, ‘Mummy, please don’t go to
Brussels tonight’.” Without hesitation she went part-time, employing all her
diplomatic skills to negotiate the first jobshare in the FCO at head of
department level. Where she has led, she wants the rest of us to follow.
It is not just parents of young children who will be the beneficiaries of her
largesse. Under her aegis, family friendly policy is likely to be expanded
to protect carers as well. These represent a sandwich generation, many of
them women, who are looking after not young children where most help is
directed at the moment but teenagers and ailing elderly parents while trying
to hold down a job as well.
Phillips has called them the “middle-life carers”, those who thought they were
going to get their life back once their children had grown up yet find
themselves looking after their infirm parents. Fair, perhaps, but yet more
headaches for employers.
Another hot topic will be age discrimination as Britain’s demographic profile
turns ever greyer. Last week Ann Southcott, a 67-year-old health worker from
Truro, Cornwall, who was sacked by her employers a day before new laws came
into force, won her job back.
“Casual ageism happens all the time — at both ends of the spectrum,” says
Brewer. “The danger is that we make assumptions about people, either because
we think they are too young or too old. Or disabled. But demographics mean
the workforce is changing. It means we need not just middle-aged
middle-class white males but ethnic minorities, women, the elderly and
disabled people in our offices. ”
It will be Brewer’s job to effect transformation. “It’s about changing social
attitudes, which can be done,” she says. “Think about drink-driving. It’s
completely unacceptable nowadays. But I can remember people saying a few
years ago, ‘Have one for the road’. And racist remarks went unchallenged.
That doesn’t happen now.”
Brewer is gutsy and glamorous, loves fashion and looks as likely to be found
reading Vogue as The Economist. As one of her aides says, she is more “Prada
than Primark”.
Her last position was director-general Europe, advising the foreign secretary
and minister for Europe on European Union policy. She has also done a stint
in overseas aid, working for the Department for International Development.
With a knack of being in foreign postings at dramatic times, she was in
Mexico during the 1985 earthquake that killed thousands and in India in 1999
when General Pervez Musharraf had just come to power in Pakistan, triggering
fears about potential nuclear conflict over Kashmir.
Her own childhood, she says, was full of disruption. Her mother suffered from
multiple sclerosis, so she was shuttled between parents and grandparents.
Her father Trevor Brewer, who was a Welsh rugby international during the
1950s, joined ICI and the family were constantly uprooting themselves.
When she was 11 they moved from Cheltenham to Northern Ireland. It was 1969,
the start of the Troubles. The pupils at her school, predominantly
Protestant, would have stones thrown at them. It got so bad that they were
bused into classes under military guard: “What has happened with power
sharing in Northern Ireland is a huge symbol of hope. That kind of
reconciliation can happen.”
It is on the human rights agenda, much maligned in Britain, she thinks, that
she feels she can have the most positive outcome: “Human rights have a poor
image in Britain. In the rest of the world they are seen as a good thing but
here it’s a bit like soccer and America. We just don’t get it. One of my
most important missions is to explain that human rights are part of the
equality agenda, they are part of everything we do.
“The elderly have a right to be treated with dignity in the work-place and not
to be maltreated in old people’s homes. Similarly, disabled people have the
right to be able to access buildings so they can join in life properly.”
You have been warned. The nanny state has just expanded into areas hitherto
seen as private ground. You are going to get your rights, whether you want
them or not.
