Andrew Allison, Head of Campaigns, talks about the latest intervention by the Equality and Human Rights Commission.
Our friends at the TaxPayers' Alliance highlighted last year that there are 438 quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisations (Quangos) in the UK. They are responsible for a massive £391 billion in public expenditure – the equivalent to 32 per cent of total managed expenditure in that financial year.
One of the most powerful is the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC). At £17.1 million a year, its budget may be small, but its scope is massive.
The EHRC was created by the Equality Act 2006 (the later Equality Act 2010 updated its role) and replaced three legacy commissions. It has the power to launch official investigations into organisations suspected of committing unlawful discriminatory acts; to issue a formal notice requiring an organisation to stop discriminatory practices; to assess any public authority's compliance without needing a prior suspicion of wrongdoing; and if a public body fails its duties, the EHRC can issue a formal compliance notice and escalate the issue to the High Court if the entity ignores it. It can also intervene directly in judicial reviews or high-profile court cases to clarify how equality or human rights laws should be applied.
When the EHRC makes an intervention, ministers are forced to listen. And one such intervention has just been made by its chairwoman, Dr Mary-Ann Stephenson, who has said that migrants needed greater access to welfare to reduce the risk of poverty among migrant households. If ministers choose to ignore this "advice", the EHRC could (and probably will) act.
If we want to stop illegal migrants crossing the English Channel, we must eliminate the incentives. And there are plenty of them available: free hotel rooms, three square meals a day, and perks that taxpayers struggle to afford themselves. Although the number of migrants housed in hotels is falling, this is because more of them (the numbers have surged past 73,000) are being housed in HMOs – Houses in Multiple Occupation.
Combine all of that with a high probability of being given indefinite leave to remain, it is hardly surprising that the UK is the destination of choice for economic migrants who see us as a soft touch and a land flowing with milk and honey.
(If you haven’t already seen a documentary on Talk last week where an undercover journalist travelled on one of the small boats, you ought to. Click HERE to watch it.)
If you are spending someone else's money on someone else, you don't care about the quality and you don't care about the price. And this is how Government and Government agencies spend your money.
The EHRC doesn't care how much illegal migrants cost taxpayers each year (the government spent £4.18 billion on asylum support, resettlement, and accommodation in the financial year ending March 2026, while the total estimated annual cost of the UK asylum and border enforcement system sits around £8 billion), because it doesn’t have to worry about such things. It does not exist to advise. It exists to act and enforce, irrespective of what our democratically elected representatives say; irrespective of voters' wishes at the ballot box.
Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg told Mark Littlewood in one of our PopConversations that civil servants do not need to purposefully "block" agendas. Instead, they point to statutory obligations created by New Labour - chiefly the Human Rights Act 1998, the Equality Act 2010, and the Climate Change Act 2008 - which legally tie the hands of ministers.
In other words, as we have said since our launch in February 2024, whilst Tony Blair’s roadblocks are in place, it will not make any difference which party is elected to government. Ministers will always have their hands tied behind their backs, and that ironically includes current Labour ministers, too!
Some of you may think that when we beat the "unite the right" drum that we are starting to sound like a scratched record, but as both the Conservatives and Reform appear to be starting to agree that the Starkey Thesis is correct and that there should be a restoration, it is more important than ever that those two parties cooperate, are civil to one another and don't actively try to destroy each other. If they continue down a path of mutually assured destruction, we will end up with another left-wing government who will ensure that the country is well and truly driven off a cliff.
The EHRC is another example of how the Quango state is out of control. It’s time for it to be put out of its misery along with the pernicious legislation which gave birth to it, and only a centre-right government is going to do it.
Keep fighting for freedom!