Women and Equalities Committee
9 June 2026
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Women and Equalities Committee House of Commons
00:05 - 01:56
Speaker 1
Order, order. Good afternoon and welcome to the Women and Equalities Select Committee. Today, we are holding an oral evidence session on the work of the Equality and Human Rights Commission. And we are joined by two colleagues from the Joint Human Rights Commission, Alex Sobel and Dr. Peter Swallow. Thank you to both of you.
We will hear first from Mary-Ann Stephenson, Chair at the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Welcome. And John Kirkpatrick, Chief Executive at Equality and Human Rights Commission. Welcome back, John. Thank you both for coming.
This is going to be quite a condensed session. We are expecting votes unfortunately around 4 o'clock, so the longer that you can stay, the better, because we have a lot to get through. With that in mind, my first question, Dr. Stephenson, is you've been in post now six months. There is a huge issue when it comes to the vastness of the EHRC's work. And with that in mind, we are going to be focusing a lot of today's session on the code of practice, understandably.
But I think it's important to recognize that the EHRC has a broad remit in the equalities and human rights field. Particularly, we are seeing the kind of civil unrest, the lack of social cohesion, the racism, the increased violence, the misogyny is continuing to be prevalent across all of our communities. It would be really good if you could outline very quickly and very short, in a very short answer, what you've learned for your last six months of the job and what you have been doing to ensure that you are hearing from a range of groups that experience discrimination, such as the disabled people, people from ethnic minority backgrounds and religious backgrounds, and those who are LGBTQ+. Each of our committee members will have eight minutes. That includes your answer as well as their question.
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