The UK’s human rights watchdog contributes “very little to meaningful equality” and should be scrapped, a think tank has said.
Civitas said the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) wrongly blamed “Britain’s unfairness” for statistical differences between social groups.
It also said there were “serious concerns” about its value for money.
The EHRC said its job was to “start a debate” about how to improve the lives of people with “unfair disadvantages”.
In a report for the right-leaning think tank, academic Jon Gower Davis said EHRC chairman Trevor Phillips had an “impractical” view of equality, based on the belief that “life outcomes [could] be entirely divorced from health limitations, cultural practices and lifestyles”.As an example, Mr Gower Davis said the EHRC “draws attention to the comparatively small differences in life expectancy between all British-born women (80.5) and women of Pakistani origin (77.3), but fails to draw attention to the much larger difference in outcomes between British women of Pakistani origin and women living in Pakistan (67.5)”.
He said the EHRC ignored cultural differences that could account for these variations and instead held the UK responsible.
He said the commission’s “narrow approach to social policy” was “neither a reasonable approach with which to judge British society, nor a useful way of developing policies to improve outcomes for minority communities”.