On Equity, Diversity and Inclusion + Open Government on a Day of Repentance

Photo by Javier Allegue Barros on Unsplash

I am writing this blog during the 10 days of Teshuva (Repentance), the days we take between the Jewish New Year and Yom Kippur (the day of atonement) to reflect, fix bad relationships and ask for forgiveness if needed. Let’s call it out then — we, UK government and civil society have sinned with our National Action Plan (NAP) process. It currently doesn’t promote diversity, equity and inclusion. It is time to repent.

The current UK action plan is long anticipated and coming after great delay and a global pandemic. Civil society organisations are pressed for resources and the government has to play catch up with many policies. With all of this, government and civil society didn’t plan our national action plan process right, which means we didn’t design it with EDI in mind, so now many voices are absent from the process. How should we fix it going forward?

1. Government should make sure there are sufficient resources from its side to show real commitment to this process — We need more than just auditing ofthe plan by the Equalities office, which is the current committed work on this. We need DEI to be planned into the process with budget lines next to it, so this work can actually be meaningful. Other governments, like Canada, did and do it in the past. We can too.
2. Government and civil society are not working together to bring new voices to the process — It’s a war of responsibilities at the moment: You bring your members and I bring mine. The field of civil society organisations that actually know about open government is small, and the same people are in for the same discussion. Civil society need to create a plan to reach other organisations that are not our usual suspects to come into the discussion, and government needs to help to connect the dots with other organisations that they speaks to. Yes, this takes time and resources, it is time to think if this is really working. Using social media will only create a snowball sample and reach people we already know.
3. Understanding Open government is hard and there is no onboarding process — This year we have some new members facilitating workstreams of the NAP, but some of them were just thrown into it. We need to create a good onboarding to explain how this process should look like. We need to outreach groups throughout the whole NAP cycle, not only during planning.
4. We don’t speak about this enough — If we really want to bring change, we need to hold ourselves accountable and discuss this more often, be transparent about the process, but we are not. People are not really discussing this on the forum or in social media. If you don’t want to discuss this because you don’t know anything about it, it is your responsibility to ask for help and guidance. Your silence will not protect you, but also won’t protect others who need you to speak.
5. We need a real commitment about DEI — We need to see how we can promote diversity, equity and inclusion in a manner that is not only collecting or openning more data on the topic. Our childcare system creates inequalities, parliament members and councillors are still not eligible to maternity leave which create blockers for participation in politics, and women of colour are more likely to suffer from stillbirth. These are only three topics where we can create change, but there are many more. We need to use this NAP to create a real policy change, not just get more numbers.

So what now? the NAP commitments will be ready to be shared for comments soon. We need to make an extra effort to share them with as many groups as possible. We need to keep the discussion on equality, equity, diversity and inclusion open and keep reflecting on it. We need to push for real actions, not just talk. We are all stretched now, we all volunteers, but let prioritise this and think of a sustainable way forward. It’s time to repent.