PATH (Scotland) aims to provide training opportunities to people from BME communities in an effort to address past and current labour market disadvantages. 

The Equality Act 2010 bought a wide range of equalities legislation together into one act.  This includes the "Positive Action" measures within the Race Relations Act (1976), which covered a range of measures which employers could legally take under the Race Relations Act (1976) to assist people from Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) backgrounds to compete on equal terms for employment where they are under-represented.

There are 2 parts to the positive action measures within the new Act.  The first part harmonises provisions allowing voluntary positive action and came into effect on 1 October 2010.  The second part relates to positive action in recruitment and promotion and will come into effect in April 2011.

In its widest sense the term is sometimes used to refer to a range or spectrum of measures the overall aim of which is to eliminate unlawful discrimination and to promote equality of opportunity, in short, to level the playing field so that everyone has an opportunity to compete for work. Such measures are likely to include many of the following examples:

• putting into practice equal opportunities, recruitment and employment policies, designed to eliminate unlawful discrimination and to promote equality of opportunity (guidance on all of these issues is given in Part 3 and 4 of the Code of Practice on Racial Equality in Employment)

• action designed to reveal areas where there may be unlawful discrimination which for public and private sector employers includes, monitoring employees and others by racial group and monitoring and assessment of workplace policies generally and for public sector employers includes compliance with the legal requirements imposed on them by the statutory public duty to promote race equality, assessments (detailed guidance about the public duty to promote race equality can be found in the Commission for Racial Equality’s code of practice “The Duty to Promote Race Equality in Scotland”)

• action taken to change any areas where unlawful discrimination or inequality of opportunity has been identified, such as changing policies and practices, racial equality targets for recruitment, promotion and training, based on the ethnic and racial composition of the workforce and the area that the employer recruits from and giving people from identified under-represented groups the opportunity to compete for work in a particular type of work where they have been under-represented or absent from altogether.

Download our leaflet "What is Positive Action?"