Ten key suggestions of the ICEC report

The Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket’s (ICEC) long-awaited report into the structural inequalities throughout race, gender and sophistication in cricket in England and Wales was lastly printed on Tuesday. The fee, introduced in March 2021, has relied on proof from over 4000 respondents throughout the sport to supply a 317-page report, “Holding Up a Mirror to Cricket”.

The report ends with 44 suggestions to “transform the game’s culture and, in some cases, to redesign the systems that govern and operate cricket.” ESPNcricinfo picks by way of 10 of the extra important ones beneath.

A public apology

The very first suggestion the ICEC makes is for the ECB to concern an “unqualified public apology for its own failings and those of the game it governs.” The apology, it says, should “acknowledge that racism, sexism, elitism and class-based discrimination have existed, and still exist, in the game, and recognise the impact on victims of discrimination.”

In explicit, the report says, there must be a direct apology for the “ECB’s and the wider game’s historic failures in relation to women’s and girls’ cricket and its failure to adequately support Black cricket in England and Wales.”

Equal pay for the ladies’s recreation

It requires worldwide match charges between the England males’s and girls’s groups to be made equal with rapid impact, business earnings for promotional appearances to be equal on common to the boys’s group by 2028, in addition to for the ECB to high up prize cash wins at ICC occasions so they’re in keeping with males’s winnings (till, the report says, the ICC makes these equal).

At home stage, the report desires girls’s regional groups to be absolutely professionalised by the beginning of the 2025 season (in addition to have rookie contracts in place a season earlier). The reviews desires common pay and prize cash to be equal to the boys’s domestically by 2029, however throughout a gradated scale (50% by 2025, 75% by 2027 and 100% by 2029). They need girls’s salaries in The Hundred to be equal to the boys’s by 2025.

Overhauling college cricket and expertise pathways

The report devotes appreciable consideration to a comparatively slender pathway that has, traditionally, struggled to faucet into as broad a base of expertise as attainable exterior of personal, fee-paying faculties. The report recommends overhauling your complete expertise pathway to “make it more meritocratic, inclusive, accountable, transparent and consistent”.

It particularly means that the ECB ought to, inside the subsequent 12 months, put in place an motion plan for state faculties, calling for a re-allocation of ECB cash at U14 stage “with the aim of ‘levelling the playing field’… to ensure that there exists an equal pathway into professional cricket for the very large majority of the England and Wales population that attend only a state school”.

The subsequent suggestion requires counties to forego any direct prices they cost for participation in expertise pathways for 2024-25, in a bid to cut back obstacles to entry for kids from decrease socio- financial and state college backgrounds. It additionally requires monetary help for different prices, corresponding to that of journey and value of apparatus to this demographic.

A nationwide T20 competitors for state college groups

By the beginning of the 2025 season, the report desires the ECB to organise county and national-level T20 competitions for boys’ and ladies’ (U14 and U15) groups from state faculties. Wins at county stage (U14s) would see faculties progress to a nationwide competitors the next 12 months (for U15s). This, the report says, ought to exchange…

Ditch Eton-Harrow at Lord’s

“These two events should be replaced by national finals’ days for state school U15 competitions for boys and girls,” the report says, “and a national finals’ day for competitions for men’s and women’s university teams.”

A brand new, unbiased regulatory physique

One of the report’s most radical suggestions is the creation of a separate regulatory physique for cricket, fully unbiased of the ECB, inside the subsequent 12 months. “The new regulatory body, not the ECB, should be responsible for investigating alleged regulatory breaches and for making decisions about whether to bring charges,” the report says, including in a subsequent suggestion that such breaches ought to embrace anti-discrimination and safeguarding guidelines.

Despite some progress, the report discovered there to be an absence of readability and independence within the ECB’s “formal regulatory system”. In its twin roles as promoter and regulator of the sport, it concluded the ECB’s potential for conflicts of curiosity was “irreconcilable” between its business issues and reputation-preservation, in opposition to the necessity at instances to take efficient regulatory motion. It was this battle that stood out by way of the Azeem Rafiq racism case.

Cricket’s class obstacles

“One of our big reflections over the last 18 months or so is that our understanding of lower socio-economic groups is not good enough,” the ECB acknowledges inside the report. One of the larger – however unsurprising – findings within the report is how little consideration has been paid by the ECB to this inequity and inaccessibility, based mostly on class, education and/or socioeconomic backgrounds. None of the assorted initiatives the ECB has undertaken through the years, the report concludes, have particularly focused obstacles to participation and progress on pathways based mostly on class.

As such, they suggest that “within the next 12 months, the ECB undertakes an in-depth examination of the class barriers that exist in cricket and develops a game-wide strategy to remove them”.

ECB ought to appoint a chief EDI officer

The report’s evaluation is that larger EDI (Equity, Diversity and Inclusion) competence and experience is required with the ECB board and govt. It is crucial, the report says, that there’s an ongoing and obligatory programme of coaching and growth of those competencies for the board and govt.

“We recommend that, within the next six months, the ECB establishes an Executive-level Chief Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Officer role with a singular focus on EDI and puts in place sufficient resources to support EDI delivery.

“We suggest that the Chief EDI Officer sits on the ECB Board for the quick to medium-term and/or till there may be improved efficiency throughout EDI outcomes.”

Put EDI front and centre of allocation decisions

In November 2021, the ECB suspended Yorkshire from hosting international cricket, as it came to terms with the full impact of Azeem Rafiq’s experiences of racism at the county. Three months later, following a change in leadership and swift internal reform, the suspension was revoked and the county staged two internationals last summer.

That is used by the report as an example in which putting EDI at the forefront of an allocation decision “is a robust device to encourage and implement compliance with EDI”. It thus recommends that the “ECB revises and clarifies its processes and standards for allocating, suspending, cancelling and reinstating excessive profile matches to put larger emphasis on EDI. There is evident proof that being allotted such matches, or having the best to host them withdrawn, is a robust device to encourage compliance with EDI”.

An open and transparent complaints policy

The report is unequivocal in its conclusion that the systems and processes cricket has in place for handling allegations of discrimination are unfit for purpose. The report found a difference in perception between those in power who generally believed the systems they operate were effective and complainants, who found those systems to be inadequate.

The ECB, the commission found, did not appreciate the role of complaints within the broader context of the fight against discrimination and that the system is not “sufficiently victim-centred”.

“We suggest that the ECB reviews clearly, publicly and yearly on complaints within the skilled and leisure recreation, together with numbers, total outcomes and actions taken to handle current and rising patterns of concern.”