Still few minorities in decision-making roles.

A new report by the Department for Communities and Local Government, published last month, which examines progress in race equality, and community cohesion has highlighted the high unemployment amongst Britain's ethnic population.

The findings reported in the section on the labour market show that the employment gap between the minority ethnic population and the general population has been between 15-20 percentage points for twenty years.

Unemployment rates were highest among black Caribbean, black African and mixed-race people - all at 9 per cent, compared with 3 per cent among the white population. Even after other factors are taken into account the odds of an African person being unemployed were four and five times higher than white people between 1983 and 2001.

Claudia Webbe, Chair of Path West Midlands, an agency that provides advice and training to black and minority ethnic people, told Black Britain: 'We are talking about a scale of unemployment as it affects black communities which is generational, systematic and deep rooted. So it requires a coming together of a wide range of bodies including quasi-governmental to address the serious problems – it’s about institutional racism.'

Claudia believes the problem is rooted in both the public and private sector. She told Black Britain: 'It is very clear that public sector bodies including government bodies are regularly failing to monitor or even quiz their suppliers and their contractors on their employment policies and practices. You have many private sector companies failing even to update their procedures in line with legal changes.'

What Path is trying to do is break down 'the glass ceiling and brick walls' and Claudia says she has seen far too many government employment initiatives in her tenure with little or no black representation and 'nobody better understands racism as it affects the black communities than those communities themselves.'

'I’ve seen a whole plethora of government initiatives try and address unemployment in black communities since the 1980s. But far too often all of these government initiatives do not have black and ethnic communities in decision making roles; they are not represented on the bodies of a lot of these initiatives from the SRB [Single Regeneration Budget] , the government inner city task force to the latest things.' Click here to find out more about Path.

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