The Press
Public health physicians have labelled a recent Government directive that public services be prioritised on need rather than ethnicity as “an affront to scientific and public health knowledge”.
This comes after the Government issued instructions to its departments and agencies that “public services should be prioritised on the basis of need, not race”. The Government said it wanted to ensure “services are not arbitrarily allocated on the basis of ethnicity”.
It was concerned that in the absence of clear expectations “agencies may use ethnic identity or other forms of personal identity as a proxy for need, and therefore a justification in itself for targeted services”, it said.