SARAH SPENCER
Deputy Director of COMPAS

Drawing on her analysis of the birth of the Commission (‘Equality and Human Rights Commission: A decade in the making’, Political Quarterly 79(1) 2008).  Sarah Spencer will show how that, notwithstanding the Paris Principles and EU discrimination law, domestic politics and institutional histories largely determined the formal design of the Commission; a process in which evidence on the impact of earlier commissions, or analysis of an optimal match between design and function, played only a minor part.  She will explore the statutory arrangements for independence and accountability, suggesting that limitations in those arrangements have underlain some of the tensions and controversies in the Commission’s early years but that the reforms currently proposed by government in that area are not those that are required.