Recommendation 9

HM Government Not Addressed

The focus of the Minister for Equalities’ work, as set out in the Terms of Reference,11 is to understand why COVID-19 has had such a disproportionate impact on ethnic minority groups, in terms of infection and death rates, and to ensure that the government is doing everything it can to mitigate that impact. While her work is considering occupational exposure as a potential COVID-19 risk factor, expanding the scope to include economic impacts for ethnic minority workers would risk undermining this focus. Furthermore, the responsibility for equalities impact assessments lies with individual departments and agencies. All Ministers and Public Bodies are fully aware of their equality duties under the law. Through UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the government has just invested a further £4.5 million in funding in four new research projects to understand why ethnic minority groups have been disproportionately impacted directly and indirectly by the pandemic.12 One of these projects, led by a team from the University of Manchester, will assess the impact of COVID-19 on ethnic minority groups across a broad spectrum of issues including health, housing, welfare, education, employment and policing. The RDU has also commissioned its own research to understand people’s lived experiences of COVID-19. The findings from this are summarised in the Minister for Equalities’ second quarterly report. There is wider work across government to address the economic impacts of COVID-19 on ethnic minority workers. This includes rolling out unprecedented levels of economic support worth over £280 billion, a much-needed lifeline, for those working in closed sectors such as retail and hospitality, the workforces in which are disproportionately young, female and from an ethnic minority background.