A BRADFORD-based charity leader has called for immediate measures to end the “social injustices suffered by minority communities”after today’s publication of the Government’s race disparity audit.

Mohammed Ali, founder and chief executive of QED Bradford, a national ethnic minority-focussed social and economic development charity, welcomed the audit, saying it helped to spread awareness of the problem.

His comments follow yesterday’s announcement that Prime Minister Theresa May was launching a “world-leading” project on the impact of ethnicity on everyday life.

She said she would challenge society to “explain or change” significant differences in the life outcomes of British ethnic minority and white people revealed in the Government’s audit.

The Prime Minister told government, business, police and other institutions they have “nowhere to hide” and must help ensure race is never a barrier to people achieving their goals in life.

Mrs May said the audit would become an “essential resource in the battle to defeat ethnic injustice.”

“People who have lived with discrimination don’t need a government audit to make them aware of the scale of the challenge,” the PM said.

“But this audit means that for society as a whole - for government, for our public services - there is nowhere to hide.”

A new website – a first of its kind in terms of scale, scope and transparency - contains thousands of statistics covering more than 130 topics in areas including health, education, employment and the criminal justice system.

The QED organisation, founded in 1990 and which helped earn Mr Ali an OBE in 2001, helped to organise a consultation event for the Cabinet Office in the city and its deputy chief executive Adeeba Malik CBE was on the report’s steering group. Now the charity wants to see the audit findings translated into positive action to make sure no one is held back because of his or her ethnic background.

Mr Ali said: “The statistics on the new Ethnicity Facts and Figures website show just how difficult it is for people from less privileged backgrounds to improve their circumstances in Britain today, but they don’t tell us anything new.

“We have been campaigning to raise awareness of the barriers that prevent people from BAME backgrounds from fulfilling their potential since 1990. Every day we work with men and women who face a daily struggle to earn enough money to provide for their families or even find a job, despite often being highly qualified.

“This is only the latest in a long series of reports highlighting just how stratified British society remains - yet until now there has been little sign that policy makers are prepared to do anything about it.

“We welcome the Prime Minister’s promise to launch a programme of work to tackle some of the disparities in the audit but we cannot create a truly fair and cohesive society unless the private, public and third sectors work alongside the government to make sure that everyone is able to enjoy the same opportunities.”

Nadeem Murtuja, Chair of JUST Yorkshire, which promotes racial justice, said: “This audit confirms the embedded structural inequality, institutional racism, and unconscious bias that exists within primarily public sector institutions that have a statutory responsibility to address the causes and inequity in outcomes for minorities and the working class.

“This audit confirms that when ethnicity and class or social economic deprivation intersects, the inequality and aspiration gap only widens – in effect making divisions on ethnic and class lines more pronounced.”