Government must act now to make LGBT lives better

POLICY-MAKERS need to be wary of using excuses of “complexity” to stop them taking difficult decisions. By stalling, lives can be blighted in the interim. I’m not talking about Brexit, yo u’ l l b e p l e a s e d to read, but the fundamental ability for people to be themselves, respected and loved for who they are.

Today, the Government published its long-awaited LGBT Action Plan, a year after it launched the biggest LGBT+ survey of its kind in the world. The Government needs to be much more nimble than this; time has dragged on. There’s nothing new in the findings. Members of the LGBT+ community have been telling policy-makers for years about the negative way they can be treated and called on the Government to make their lives better.

At Pride in London we have conducted research and mounted some of the biggest campaigns the capital has seen to highlight issues such as hate crime.

It is time for the tough decisions to be taken on how to improve people’s lives and give LGBT+ people greater protections and an equal chance of contributing to society and living happy, fulfilled lives in safety.

As the results show, young people are still experiencing negative reactions when in school due to them being, or being perceived to be, LGBT+ and 23 per cent of people said they had experienced a negative or mixed reaction in their workplace due to their sexual orientation. It is little wonder therefore that 68 per cent of respondents said they had avoided holding hands in public for fear of a negative reaction.

We are still on a journey towards equality; the introduction of equal marriage under David Cameron helped and for the first time everyone had access to it — except those living in Northern Ireland, and that’s an outrage as “equality” must include everyone in the UK.

What matters is education. Would 94 per cent of people not report serious incidents to the police if they’d been brought up knowing that being who they are is OK? I doubt it.

What the Government now needs to do is get on with it. It should ensure that all pupils really do receive proper relationship and sex education, no matter what type of school they are in; enable brilliant teachers who happen to also be LGBT+ to t h r ive in the classroom knowing the state has got their back, and for brilliant smaller charities and groups to be supported to help educate and inform.

We are coming up to our largest ever Pride in London parade, with more than 400 different groups and hundreds of thousands of people ready to show that pride matters.

We will remind politicians that not o n ly d o we c a re a b o u t this issue passionately, but that in a year’s time we expect to see real results. No ifs, no buts and no maybes.

⬤ Michael Salter-Church is the co-chair of @PrideinLondon