This quoted a report from the Taxpayers’ Alliance, which calls for councils to axe posts such as diversity officers, suggesting they are “unnecessary” and that money should be concentrated on frontline services.
I’d like to make clear how ignorant and short-sighted it is to adopt this attitude.
The work of officers on the issues of equality and diversity is vitally important to councils – especially at a time when services are under pressure and cuts will be made. People must be treated fairly and one group should not suffer more than another. Councils and private businesses have a legal duty to ensure they treat people fairly.
The development of the role of diversity officer in Shropshire Council has seen an enormous amount of progress in dealing with race hate crime.
Work has progressed in partnership with the police and Crime Prosecution Service. It is not just race hate, though, that has been tackled; recent initiatives against disability hate crime have highlighted how some of the most vulnerable in society are victims.
Councillor Liz Parsons
Champion for Equality & Diversity
I’d like to make clear how ignorant and short-sighted it is to adopt this attitude.
The work of officers on the issues of equality and diversity is vitally important to councils – especially at a time when services are under pressure and cuts will be made. People must be treated fairly and one group should not suffer more than another. Councils and private businesses have a legal duty to ensure they treat people fairly.
The development of the role of diversity officer in Shropshire Council has seen an enormous amount of progress in dealing with race hate crime.
Work has progressed in partnership with the police and Crime Prosecution Service. It is not just race hate, though, that has been tackled; recent initiatives against disability hate crime have highlighted how some of the most vulnerable in society are victims.
Councillor Liz Parsons
Champion for Equality & Diversity
That’s what HR departments are for. Our company has an HR department, but we don’t have a “diversity officer” because we don’t need one.
But surely the “progress in dealing with race hate crime” is a police function?
The clue is in the word “crime”.
If someone feels that they have been the victim of a hate crime, their first port of call should be to a police station, not to a council equality and diversity officer.
Destroyed communities, countless numbers of ruined lives with many of our children and elderly forced to live in poverty – Plus two illegal wars that have led to hundreds of our brave lads dying as well as many thousands of innocent civillians?
So much for Labour’s society of equality!
Maybe we’re being a bit harsh.
Maybe we could encourage Liz Parsons to broaden the debate by posting the job description pertaining to a diversity and equality officer within her council? Oh, and the salary as well.
By doing so, we would all see what the job really does involve and hone our comments and reactions accordingly.
Over to you, Liz.
It shouldn’t be. But it very often is.
If the council and the law believes in equality – then, for flip sake, they should treat all victims crime equally! So-called ‘hate crime’ is just another politically correct term imported from America.
Scrap these silly expensive ‘pc’ council positions and put the savings to better uses in the vital frontine services instead.
The people have spoken!
Just because the looney left of the last government made laws about E&D doesnt mean its right.
Rodney’s request is a reasonable one as it would result in us seeing that the primary purpose of this position is to educate us all as to the benefits of racial, gender, religious, …. understanding and tolerance. And the penalties for not being tolerant.
To address the hate crimes we have a police force, and if it comes to hate crimes being committed then the diversity officers have failed miserably, as have we as a civilised society.
The officers are a waste of money. They are trying to enforce something that we all know courtesy of common-sense. To focus on hate crimes is to direct efforts at a very small fraction of the population that are likely beyond help and need to be visited by the police.
Mean people suck. Peace.
As reported in the Shropshire Star (Nov 2nd)- Telford & Wrekin Council spent £126,000 on THREE ‘diversity officers’ in 2009/10 and Shropshire Council spent £31,406 on it’s one diversity officer.
All this at a time when there’s talk of scrapping the ‘meals-on-wheels’ service for our elderly folk.
Councils and private businesses may well have a legal duty to ensure they treat people fairly, but this does not mean they need to set up departments and employ specific staff to ensure they are conforming to the law, neither does it mean that it is the job of the council to ensure the rest of us do, after all we already have a service tasked with enforcing the law. Further as for instance Manchester council does not employ any diversity officers, the role of diversity officer is obviously not obligatory, it is thus nothing more than a politically informed appointment designed to further left wing political objectives.
Councillor Liz Parsons might well proudly be a Champion for Equality & Diversity but why should the rest of us have to lose out on front line services so that she can indulge her own political inclination by developing a thought crime department, it is our money she is spending not her own.