Welsh Liberal Democrat Assembly Member, Peter Black was on BBC Wales’ Politics Show yesterday afternoon calling for a fair deal for local racial equality and other groups. The BBC website takes up the story:
Equality groups claim jobs and services are under threat because the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) is to take a break from funding them.
The commission’s grants programme is being deferred six months from April. Swansea Bay Racial Equality Council said the decision could cost them between £30,000 and £40,000.
But the EHRC’s director in Wales said it was made clear funding was for a year and organisations should not have expected automatic renewal.
Director of Swansea Bay Racial Equality Council, Taha Idris, told BBC Wales’ Politics Show some of his organisation’s work would suffer without the funding.
“We may actually have to, unfortunately, lay people off if we can’t find the funds to be able to carry out the sort of work that we intended to carry out next year,” he said.
Peter Black first highlighted this issue just before Christmas. He said:
“The merger of six organisations to form the new Equality and Human Rights Commission has created a huge amount of uncertainty amongst the organisations that this body funds. We are now in a situation whereby Welsh organisations have to compete with their English counterparts for the same pot of money meaning that Welsh priorities are not being met. This means that smaller organisations like the Swansea Bay Racial Equality Council will lose out to the big English Cities.”
The EHRC are talking about a full scale review, effectively leaving existing organisations in limbo for six months whilst they make up their mind what to do about with their money. That may be fine in theory but it could cause job losses and the derailment of the Assembly’s equality agenda. The Minister really needs to intervene to sort this out.
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