New equality commission is savaged again

The chair of the Disability Rights Commission (DRC) has added his voice to the chorus of discontent over the Commission for Equality and Human Rights (CEHR).

Speaking at Northampton University, Bert Massie said the new commission - which will replace the DRC and the government's other equality watchdogs next October -lacks the grassroots support it will need.

Questioning the CEHR's ability to deliver for the groups it is meant to help, he claimed that grassroots organisations "have largely been conscripts to the entire process, at various stages threatening to strangle the thing at birth or even at conception".

Massie's remarks are the latest of many criticisms that have already been levelled at the CEHR. In a damning critique published in July by black-led human rights group the 1990 Trust and Operation Black Vote, the campaign seeking a stronger political voice for black communities, the commission was described as having "marginally less powers to enforce race laws than exist at present, with no guarantee of a race committee to keep the issue on the agenda".

And this year's TUC Black Workers' Conference saw motions from the FBU firefighters' union and journalists' union the NUJ demanding adequate funding, a committee for race issues and guaranteed black and minority ethnic representation (see April's Labour Research, page 10).

For Massie, the CEHR will succeed only if it makes a "real and beneficial impact in the lives of those who have most to gain and least to lose ... Anything less will be a scandal."