27 April 2007
The chair of the Commission for Equality and Human Rights has rejected claims that the planned new body has been 'downsized' with a budget less than half the size experts said it needed.
'I know the standard position for someone like me is to come in and say: “It's an outrage, we're being downsized”,' CEHR chair Trevor Phillips told MPs on April 24. 'But let's be straight about this: nobody would want to bring together these commissions if we weren't going to enjoy some economies of scale.'
The CEHR launches in October and is an amalgamation of the existing commissions for race, disability and equal opportunities.
The Equal Opportunities Commission has argued that the CEHR should have an operating budget of £125m, and a start-up budget of £80m. Instead, it will receive £70m and £24m.
'It would be great to have more,' said Phillips. 'But in the end we will have to do as good a job as we can with the funds made available to us.'
Phillips said he was more concerned about the lack of time he had to establish the new body.
He told MPs: 'We should have had the equalities review [first], then the discrimination law review, followed by a new Act, followed by the setting up of a new institution.'
Instead, the government announced its intention to set up the CEHR, then commissioned the reviews and an Act is not expected before 2009.
Dr Phyllis Starkey, chair of the Commons communities and local government committee, told Public Finance that it had asked for a CEHR business plan and had not yet been given one.
'We don't know how they're intending to spend the budget,' she told PF.
PFapr2007
