Why councils ask if you’re transgender when you call about the wheelie bins

NO DOUBT the bigwigs at Birmingham City Council thought they should be seen to be doing something about its shambolic waste-collection service, which last December saw the streets disappear beneath 10fthigh piles of rubbish.

But quite how the ‘Attitudes To Recycling And Rewards’ survey it has just sent out to residents is supposed to help it empty the bins is anyone’s guess.

After a few mundane questions on wheelie bins, it suddenly demands to know: ‘ Which of the following most accurately describes your sexual orientation? Bisexual? Gay man? Gay woman/lesbian? Heterosexual/straight? Other?’

For anyone who dares to keep such information to themselves in this day and age, there is at least the opportunity to tick: ‘Prefer not to say?’

If the council was asking residents about the provision of night clubs or dating agencies in the city, it is feasible to see why it might need to know. But what conceivable reason is there for officials to want to pry into our bedrooms over wheelie bins?

At best, it comes across as a bizarre waste of time and taxpayers’ money. At worst, it is downright sinister to think that somewhere on a council computer will sit a database of where all gay and lesbian people live. It makes you wonder if, like a medieval plague village with yellow crosses

They never ask: do you want your tax wasted on surveys?

on the door, Birmingham is going to issue pink wheelie bins to householders who identify themselves as gay.

It would be reassuring to think this was a lone act by a loony Left council (Birmingham is Labour- controlled). But council tax payers all over the country are being left bewildered by a torrent of questionnaires demanding bizarre, irrelevant and deeply private information.

When Richenda Legge wrote to North Norfolk District Council asking why her bin hadn’t been emptied, she too was asked for her sexuality — and her ethnicity and religion.

Pensioner Bill Torrance applied to Falkirk Council to have his grass cut – and was sent a questionnaire asking him a series of personal questions, including about his sexual preferences.

Residents who live near a proposed relief road at Manchester Airport were recently asked in a consultation: ‘ Is your gender identity the same as the gender you were assigned with at birth?’

Susan Field, a 67-year-old from Harrow, was asked the same question when she contacted her council to complain about a set of traffic lights.

‘We have so little privacy left,’ she said. ‘ Why should I give intimate details to a total stranger on such an unrelated matter.’

When my car was broken into one evening, I was at first relieved to be rung up by a police officer the next day. I thought he had news that they had caught the thief who had smashed the driver’s window.

It was only when he wanted to know my ethnic identity that it dawned on me why he had really rung me: he had some kind of victims’ monitoring form to fill in. When I declined to say what ethnic group I am from, he politely hung up and I never heard any more.

I’ve lost count of the times I’ve been asked for my ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation and gender identity on official forms. But the question which, funnily enough, I don’t ever remember being asked is: do I want my taxes frittered away on these pointless monitoring exercises — or would I rather the money was spent on doing practical things, such as emptying the bins or f i nding the man who smashed my car?

I know what the answer would be if a council did put that question to us: i t would make last week’s landslide referendum in the Falkland Islands look like an even contest. There can’t be anyone outside those who work in the ‘ equality-monitoring’ industry, as it is known — although admittedly this does employ quite a large number of people now — who would vote for the silly forms. They certainly don’t impress a lot of the people they are supposed to please.

Actor Sir Ian McKellen, who isn’t slow to complain about homophobia wherever he senses it, roundly condemned the Arts Council for including a question about sexual orientation on a funding application form.

Nosy questions about ethnicity, sexuality and gender are part of a bureaucracy that is spinning out of control. And the irony is that it doesn’t come from any genuine concern to stamp out inequality, but from pen-pushers building empires.

What we, the public, see is nothing compared with the nonsense that public- sector bodies inflict upon their own staff. Two years ago, Buckinghamshire County Council staff issued its staff with a questionnaire entitled ‘Respecting Sexuality’. Among the questions they were expected to answer were ‘What do you think caused your heterosexuality?’, and ‘Is it possible your sexuality stems from a neurotic fear of others of the same sex?’

The questionnaire was supposed to make heterosexual employees think about what it is like being gay, but the whole exercise stinks of a crass waste of money.

The purpose of this silly ‘equality monitoring’ exercise is to force public authorities, and in some cases private companies, to collect personal data that can then be analysed — supposedly to detect inadvertent discrimination.

A requirement to collect ethnic data was introduced by the Blair government a decade ago, and the exercise was then extended to gender and sexuality through Harriet Harman’s 2010 Equality Act.

Disgracefully, there was hardly any political opposition to the bill, with David Cameron — frightened to ruffle the feathers of the equality lobby in the run-up to the 2010 general election — allowing the Equality Bill to be nodded through without even a Commons vote.

Needless to say, it is costing us a fortune. According to the thinktank Civitas, fulfilling the demands of ‘equality monitoring’ is costing employers £ 1 billion a year — £ 400 million of which is i n the private sector. It has spawned an entire industry of diversity officers and equality officers employed to collate and publicise the data.

If you work in manufacturing or construction at the moment, you may well be struggling to find a job,

This ‘equality monitoring’ costs £1bn each year

but t here i s no shortage of employment in t he equality industry. Yesterday, one employment agency was showing more than 400 j obs available i n the category ‘equality officer’, 60 of them paying more than £60,000 a year.

If equality monitoring has ever revealed any enlightening information, I can’t say I can remember it. Does it really help anyone, for example, to know that precisely 16.1 per cent of staff at the Department for Transport identify themselves as black or another minority ethnicity?

What it has done, on the other hand, is to provide opportunities for campaigners to pick out highly selective data . And those campaigners are not always of the politically correct persuasion.

While the whole business of equality monitoring was dreamed up with the intention that it would allow statisticians to sniff out discrimination against minorities, the data is also available to the likes of the BNP.

In its usual attempt to stir up discontent, it has, for example, accused the BBC of ‘flooding’ itself with ethnic minorities by selecting a statistic which shows that 47 per cent of places on a BBC journalism trainee scheme identified themselves as being from an ethnic minority.

Given that the BBC trainee scheme covers foreign reporting and the World Service, it is hardly surprising that i t has a high international intake.

No matter how much we regard diversity monitoring as a waste of time and money, and counterproductive in its aim of promoting equality, when we are presented with an official form demanding to know personal details such as our gender, race and sexuality, it is easy to be fooled into thinking we have to fill it in. We don’t.

If we want to stop this colossal waste of money, we can undermine it by refusing t o answer t he questions altogether.

That is what I do. So should you.