Profile - Angela Mason - All things equal

24 Jan 08
The IDA showed it was taking equality issues seriously when it hired big hitter Angela Mason as adviser to local government. She tells Joseph McHugh her plans

25 January 2008

The IDA showed it was taking equality issues seriously when it hired big hitter Angela Mason as adviser to local government. She tells Joseph McHugh her plans

Veteran equality campaigner and activist Angela Mason has just been given a CBE in the New Year's Honours list when we meet. It's the second time she's been honoured – she bagged an OBE in 1999 – and it shows the reputation that the former head of campaigning gay rights group Stonewall has built.

No wonder the Improvement and Development Agency is trumpeting its latest signing. Mason is a big hitter and her appointment as its national adviser to local government for equality and cohesion – a new post for the agency – is a real coup.

Her role is to ensure that everyone at risk of discrimination, whether on grounds of gender, race, age, disability, religious belief or sexuality, has equal access to town hall services and, more widely, to life opportunities.

Her brief is broad and challenging, from the effects of large-scale immigration to ensuring equal pay for local government employees.

Alongside this, she is charged with helping authorities to foster a sense of community among their increasingly diverse residents and to defuse any tensions.

She is frank about local government's shortcomings when it comes to the equalities and cohesion agenda. One of the most pressing problems, she argues, is the absence of reliable information systems to reveal what is happening in communities.

'I'm a strong believer that you can't make progress if you don't know what your local issues are. You can't understand your community and your place unless you understand the people. We've got to be a lot smarter and think more,' Mason says.

'This information is out there, but it's not easily accessible or understood. We have to explore how we can develop [it] to make sense of migration, equality and cohesion.'

The IDA has seconded a statistician from the Office for National Statistics to devise better ways of generating and standardising the information.

For Mason, this is a first step towards her more ambitious aim of bringing the equality and community cohesion agenda into the mainstream of local government.

'Local Area Agreements really are the name of the game now. If we can put together benchmarks that are developed throughout the sector then everyone will understand the standards they are expected to meet.'

The UK's population is growing rapidly. Recent data from the ONS suggest that net immigration could eventually run at around 190,000 per year, while the population is expected to shoot up from 60 million today to 71 million in 2032.

Such growth will be accompanied by greater diversity: already 4.6 million people, 8% of those living in the UK, belong to a recognised ethnic minority.

It's hardly surprising, then, that individual local authorities face a range of different challenges around social cohesion. Against this shifting backdrop, simple across-the-board solutions are hard to find.

Nevertheless, Mason believes a strong national lead is crucial. That involves enshrining rights in a legislative framework – and then taking action to promote them.

She declares herself 'in favour of positive action, but not positive discrimination. I don't think you can just sit on your hands and do nothing. Clarifying the law could help: people are nervous that positive action might be against the law,' Mason explains.

'But progress needs to be made at national level. One authority can't do it on their own because of the resources involved, plus they wouldn't want to train lots of people and then see them go off to work elsewhere.'

Much of this is big-picture stuff. So what can an individual local authority do? The key, Mason argues, is transparency. 'In local government, people are often put in very difficult positions, so they need to be transparent and communicate, and tell residents what is going on.'

They also need to carry on their 'myth-busting' efforts so residents do not fall prey to propaganda claiming that particular groups of residents – notably new migrants – are receiving favourable treatment. The allocation of housing is 'a big issue' in this respect, as is economic regeneration.

'The economic benefits of migration are quite widely recognised, which is good, but the social costs are not,' Mason says. 'Equal access to employment is absolutely key. I very much welcome the economic regeneration agenda but you have to ask who you are creating the jobs for.'

The IDA is doing its bit, running a project involving 11 authorities to study different aspects of migration and its impact on host communities. But Mason detects an appetite within the sector to solve these thorny issues, even if it means heading into uncharted territory. 'What there is in local government is a great willingness to get to grips with the problems and try to sort them out,' she says.

Mason's faith in the sector owes much to the fact that she cut her teeth there. A qualified solicitor, the 63-year-old worked at Camden and Battersea law centres in the 1970s before joining the London Borough of Camden in 1975 as a welfare rights adviser, a post she stayed in for eight years.

Mason then became the social services department's solicitor and, following a short stint in the mid-1980s as a neighbourhood solicitor in Tower Hamlets, another London borough, she returned to Camden as principal solicitor in 1986 and stayed for six years.

In 1992, she joined gay rights campaign group Stonewall as its executive director. It is probably her most high-profile role to date and one she performed for a decade, until the poacher decided to turn gamekeeper in 2002.

She joined the civil service to run the then Department of Trade & Industry's Women and Equality Unit, which transferred to the new Department for Communities and Local Government in 2006 (and is now part of the Government Equalities Office). At the WEU, Mason oversaw the introduction of civil partnerships for gay couples, which she has since taken advantage of to formalise her own relationship.

She also set up the single equalities regulator, the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, and led a major review of existing anti-discrimination legislation, publishing a green paper last year that is expected to result in a new equality Bill in 2008.

With such a high-octane CV, Mason was welcomed by the IDA with open arms when she joined the agency late last year.

She says it is an exciting time for the sector, which is enjoying a renaissance of confidence within central government. She is optimistic this in turn will lead to a sharper focus on the tensions and challenges facing communities around the country.

'Centralism started around the time I worked in local government. That's one of the reasons I got out; I didn't like it very much. What we had before was very prescriptive, but not really very focused on improving people's life chances. But what we're seeing now is a shift from focusing on processes to outcomes.

'When you're in Whitehall you have the luxury of theorising and you are not constantly reminded of the reality and complexities of what councils have to face on the ground.'

The flip side of these wide-ranging new responsibilities is the need to develop new skills to meet them – but Mason is optimistic that this is achievable, despite the constraints of the tightest finance settlement in ten years.

'If councils are to perform the role that's being asked of them, then local government will have to develop a whole set of new skills. To do this, it needs to attract ambitious and capable people.

'But a lot of this is about doing things differently and is not massively resource-intensive. I'm talking about a more imaginative and analytical way of looking at things. I can't believe it's impossible.'

PFjan2008

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