The Equality and Human Rights Commission is planning to launch a Construction Leadership Diversity Forum following the results of its Race and the Construction Industry Inquiry.

The Forum is one of a series of measures that the Commission has developed to help combat racism and the under-representation of certain groups within in the industry, including ethnic minorities, women and the disabled.

The forum will be launched in the summer of 2010, and will strive to give clear guidance on the equality and diversity issues that arise in the construction industry. Its focus will be on leadership, procurement, employment and skills. It will also perform a coordinating and monitoring role throughout the initiative, ensuring that progress is made on the stated aims.

The original inquiry was published in July 2009, and it determined that a negative image of the industry and unsatisfactory recruitment practices were some of the reasons why minorities were under-represented in the construction sector.

The construction industry employs three million people in the UK, which amounts to eight per cent of the entire workforce. However, only three percent of this number are from an ethnic minority, and only one per cent are women.

To combat this under-representation, the Commission has recommended:

• Launching the Construction Leadership Diversity Forum.
• Linking with key government initiatives such as Building Schools for the Future to promote broader procurement possibilities.
• Keeping track of data to monitor areas of disproportionate impact, in addition to promoting a more thorough understanding of diversity monitoring throughout the industry as a whole.

Research conducted on behalf of the Commission in 2008 found that a large number of ethnic minority businesses needed to build their capacity in order to compete for contracts on an equal footing with more established contractors. Equality can be pursued through procurement, but, in order to assure that equality outcomes are achieved, good equality and diversity practice has to be maintained.

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