Miss Harman, the Equalities Secretary, will today tell the Audit Commission and Ofsted that under the new Equality Bill they must monitor how public bodies plan to reduce the divide in “class audits”. The proposals mean NHS strategic health authorities could be told to target more of their spending on public health issues, such as smoking and bad diet in poorer areas.
That would mean money is shifted away from services in more prosperous areas.
Ofsted, the schools inspectorate, will also be told to make sure education authorities are targeting resources on children from working class homes. The Government says that by the age of six, bright children from poor families are overtaken by less able children from wealthier families.
Miss Harman last year asked Prof John Hills of the London School of Economics to review how social class affects job prospects, health and education.
She will publish some of Prof Hills’s findings today, arguing that more must to done to narrow the gap between rich and poor.
“Evidence reviewed by the panel underlines that whether it is educational attainment, income or housing, those from the most deprived backgrounds tend to do worse,” Miss Harman said. “This is what the socio-economic duty is designed to challenge.
“So the new duty will attack one of the most fundamental and stubborn of all the determinants of inequality and ensure public bodies take action to tackle it.”
All public bodies will be legally obliged to consider how they can “reduce socio-economic inequalities” when making decisions about spending and services.
The measure described by Labour advocates as “socialism in one clause” has drawn suggestions that Miss Harman is trying to deploy the politics of class war.
For a decade under Tony Blair, Labour played down the importance of differences in social class.
However, Miss Harman, the party’s deputy leader who is thought by many MPs to be a potential Labour leadership candidate, has broken that silence by saying social class is the “overarching” issue in British life.
Some Labour ministers privately insist that her measure is not significant, arguing that the legal duty is too nebulous to be widely implemented.
However, Miss Harman is intent on making sure that her law leads to significant changes in the way that public bodies operate. She is telling the key public service “inspectorates” such as the Audit Commission, a spending watchdog, to monitor public bodies.
The data collected by the auditors will be passed to Miss Harman’s Government Equalities Office, which could then take legal action against those organisations failing to implement the class law.
Officials insist the Bill will not lead public bodies to change the way they deal with individuals and make decisions on issues such as who they employ.
