Recommendation 40

We believe that most forces should be able to make rapid progress with clear targets and using the positive action provisions in the Equality Act 2010 we have identified. We heard concerns raised by the Metropolitan Police that some of the Equality Act provisions cannot be applied in the same way to large volume recruitments of the kind that police forces undertake and that temporary changes to the legal framework are needed in order to make rapid progress during the current recruitment uplift. We note with interest Dame Cressida Dick’s proposal to make temporary changes to section 159 (4)(b) of the Equality Act 2010 for the remaining period of the police uplift programme. She argued that this would enable the police to accelerate the recruitment of meritorious Black and minority ethnic candidates by applying, in principle, the same tie breaker positive action method that is already legal in individual appointment decisions to large volume policing recruitment campaigns. We have not had the opportunity to take evidence on the workability or legal merits of Dame Cressida Dick’s proposition but we consider that a proposal on this issue from the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police is worthy of the most serious 182 The Macpherson Report: Twenty-two years on deliberation. We recommend the Home Office urgently investigates the feasibility of the Commissioner’s proposal and reports the outcome of this investigation to us at the first opportunity.