It's time to end this 'two-tier' nonsense

A blog by our CEO, Joy Warmington.

Doing this work, you come across a lot that makes your blood boil. But what really makes me angry is when politicians take serious questions of equality and public safety and turn them into weapons.

Yesterday the government announced that Black men aged 45 to 74 would be offered prostate cancer screening. In response, Zia Yusuf, Reform Home Affairs Spokesperson, posted this on Twitter:

In doing so, he framed a targeted public health intervention, designed to respond to a known inequality in health risk, as discrimination against white people. An attempt to make a public service more responsive is being presented as a public service becoming unfair. This completely misunderstands not only what equity is, but – more seriously – what public services are for.

The NHS is not giving Black men a privilege. It is responding to a gap. Black men face a significantly higher risk of prostate cancer than other men. The issue is not that Black men are being placed above others; it is that a mainstream system, designed around the average patient, can fail to see particular risks clearly enough until those risks are named and acted on.

This is not a two-tier service. A two-tier service is one where some people receive better treatment because they have more power, more money, more influence, more confidence, or more proximity to the assumptions built into the system.

We understand this in almost every other context. We do not object when older people are offered flu vaccines. We do not call maternity care a ‘two-tier’ service because it is offered to pregnant women. We do not say reasonable adjustments for disabled people are unfair to non-disabled people. We understand that different needs require different responses. ‘Equality’ does not mean treating everyone the same.

What does it mean? Equality is about human rights. It is about recognising that every person has equal worth, and is therefore equally entitled to safety, care, protection and opportunity.

At brap, we often talk about ‘equity’ rather than ‘equality’ because equity gets us to the practical question: what do people need in order to receive what they are already entitled to? So when we talk about equity, we are not talking about preferences or privileges – we are talking about whether services are meeting their obligations.

So-called 'two tier' policing

This is also why the recent ‘two-tier policing’ arguments following the murder of Henry Nowak need to be handled carefully. Like most people, I felt sick watching the bodycam footage. From what has been reported, the police response was appalling. My heart goes out to his family.

I don’t think what happened was an example of equality ‘going too far’. As I said, equality is about human rights, and in that moment, the moment of his death, Henry Nowak didn’t have his rights protected. What happened was a failure of policing – it was poor judgement, poor training, a failure to listen, no doubt other things too. The things we expect in our public services – compassion, responsiveness, understanding – were not there.

This is why we talk about equity: because public services should be judged by whether people actually receive the care, protection, and dignity they are entitled to – regardless of who they are.

The deeper question is not whether some people are being given unfair extras. The deeper question is whether everyone is getting what they are entitled to. That is why the language of ‘two-tier’ public services is so dangerous. It takes real concerns about fairness and redirects them away from the causes of inequality and towards resentment of those who experience it.

What next?

What makes this particularly worrying is the way emotions are being exploited. When people are grieving, frightened, angry, or frustrated, there is a natural desire to find an explanation and someone to blame. Rather than helping us understand what has gone wrong, some politicians encourage us to direct those emotions towards other groups of people. The result is not a better understanding of public services, but a growing sense that one group's gain must come at another's expense.

This is possible because, as a society, we continue to misunderstand both the nature of racism and the purpose of efforts to address it. As long as we see racism through the simplistic lens of competition between groups, we leave ourselves vulnerable to those who want to turn legitimate concerns into division and resentment.

Many of the challenges we see across health, policing, education, etc are not the result of one group being prioritised over another. They reflect a more consistent failure: services don't always recognise and respond to people's differing needs. Sometimes that failure affects Black communities. Sometimes it affects disabled people, older people, rural communities, working-class communities, or others. The question is not who deserves the blame. The question is how we build services capable of delivering fairness, dignity, and protection to everyone.

Let's be honest about what is happening here. Some politicians are trying to exploit tragic events and public grief for political gain. They are trying to turn people's pain into permission to roll back equality.

We cannot let them.

Here are the words of Henry Nowak's father, which are probably the only words that really matter.