Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, talks to ePolitix.com about how he plans to promote a human rights culture in Britain.

Question: Is the commission now up and running successfully?

Trevor Phillips: Like any new house that you move into, on the day you move in maybe the curtains aren't exactly the way you would like them to be and you have to do some unpacking, but as of Monday we will be in business.

The phones will be answered and the website will be up. We'll be functioning as you would expect us to. Maybe not with all the bells and whistles that will come later, but we will be a functioning commission.

Keep in mind that this is not coming out of nowhere. We are inheriting the authority and the work of three existing commissions and we've been helped into being by a whole raft of stakeholders who are helping us get the commission into shape to deal with some of the new challenges - sexual orientation, religious belief and age as well.

So we're not starting from zero, we may not be perfect to begin with but we're going to try and get there as quickly as we can.

Question: Why is now the right time for a single equality body?

Trevor Phillips: When the first equality commissions came into being in the mid-1970s, what they were really focused on was individual redress for individual acts of discrimination and over the last 30 years I think they've done a pretty damn good job at both dealing with some of those kinds of cases but also giving the country a better sense of what is permissible and what is not permissible.

So today, although there are lots of cases of individual discrimination, we can see now that they're not the whole problem.

Now is the time we've got to address a whole series of other kinds of disadvantage based not just on disability, race or gender but also on sexual orientation and so on, we now know that.

We also know we have to be more proactive, we have to think about how we can prevent discrimination and disadvantage rather than just punishing people when it comes about.

More fundamentally than that I think something really profound is happening in this society, and that is that we are a society that has much more difference in it, more diversity. Some of that is objective because of migration and so on, but some of it is also subjective - people who 30 years ago were content to suppress for example their sexual orientation or disabled people who would put up with being treated as though they were invisible will no longer do so and nor should they.

So what we're in is an age of difference where we need to recognise the many different shapes and sizes and qualities and flavours in which humanity comes and that's a great thing, but it doesn't happen by itself. You have to manage it, you have to make sure that people behave properly and deal with difference well and that's our job.

Question: One of the other issues has been whether the commission might end up giving priority, say, to age over race. Are you confident that won't be a problem?

Trevor Phillips: I'm confident it's not going to be a problem because we've got to a place where, in reality, we shouldn't be thinking about this new commission just as a chorus of individual voices telling people how terrible things are.

What we really need to be thinking about the commission as is thinking about how we change our communities, how we change our institutions, how we change organisations to behave in a way that makes them fairer, so we don't have to ask the question about how is a black person, how is a disabled person going to be treated?

The institution itself should be reformed in such a way that we don't need to be thinking about the so-called strands, but we should be thinking 'is this institution fair to everybody?'

It might sound abstract, but if you are thinking about a hospital, a hospital that pays attention to every individual as an individual will be treating older people or ethnic minority people fairly because they'll be giving every individual a better service.

The voice that says 'will you give that group attention' is asking the wrong question. The right question is 'are you going to be able to lead the change in society that means that every individual is treated as a fully-fledged human being'.

Question: Does this mean role of the commission will be very different from how, say, the Commission for Racial Equality went about business?

Trevor Phillips: I think there will be a change of emphasis. We're not going to abandon casework but we're going to put a lot more energy into stopping discrimination happening before it takes place.

Hopefully that means we have to put less resources into getting people compensation after they have been hurt.

The essential point here is that although it is important there are remedies, it is even more important to stop people doing the things that force you to employ those remedies.

Question: What will be your priorities for your first year?

Trevor Phillips: The first priority is to get our organisation up and running, make it credible, to make sure that when people come to us with a problem they are answered fully and sympathetically and we give them the most support they can be given.

Secondly, I think we need to establish what are the really big battlegrounds. It's pretty clear I think, and we'll be saying more about this, that the workplace has to be the central place where we mount our big charge, if I can put it that way, to improve life chances and so on.

But over and above that I think we need to start telling what people in politics now call 'new narratives'. We need to get people to understand equality and human rights in a different way.

In the case of equality, we need to get people to understand that equality is not about special interests but its in everybody's interests.

And in the case of human rights, it's not about a small number of people who are in some way taking advantage of the rest of us, but human rights are really about the ground rules for a fairer society and once again that's in everybody's interests.

So our big priority after getting the organisation working, focusing on the workplace, is to start to get the British public to think differently about the issues of equality and human rights and to understand we're not a body for special interests, we're a body in everybody's interests.

Question: How do you go about changing those public perceptions?

Trevor Phillips: Some of it is going to be the language we use, some of it is going to be the cases we take up, and some of it is going to be the causes we pursue. We will try and deal with issues that are much broader concerns.

So when we think about the workplace we will be saying that yes we want to attack the pay gap, yes we want to reduce the ethnic penalty, yes we want to make it more accessible to disabled people.

But we're not just going to do that by battering everybody over the head and trying to make them feel guilty, what we'll try to do is say 'what are the changes that might make British workplaces more friendly to everybody?'

If they're more friendly to everybody, they will, by definition, be more friendly to black people or to disabled people or more flexible for women or carers.

And the example of carers is a good one. Here is a cause we're going to put out weight behind because if you champion carers you're championing families, older people, the disabled.

What we're trying to get out of the stream that says we are here just to champion and advocate for certain selected and favoured minority groups but we're here for everybody.

Question: Columnist Jackie Ashley has suggested you might make front page news and cause passionate rows. Will that happen?

Trevor Phillips: She said that and I think I will agree with her. I hope we won't cause front page news every day, but look at the issues we deal with - the issues of race, the issues of job segregation by gender, the issues of the pay gap, questions which are to do with the position of disabled people, end of life questions - all of these are issues that we know people feel passionately about.

And that's before we get onto the new ground of, let's say, the relationship between religious institutions and their attitudes towards sexual orientation, and then eventually we have the territory of old versus young, should we spend more on the older population or is that at the expense of the young?

The point is we are going to be dealing with a range of issues which we already know are explosive. The reason these things are so friction-laden is because as a society we haven't yet found ways of dealing with some of these issues of difference.

Now the first thing in dealing with them is social justice because people are never going to agree if some people feel they're always going to be treated as second-class citizens.

But more than that, part of our job is to try and get different kinds of people to understand each other better, to talk to each other more, and that's hard when there are already these frictions.

So in a sense, we are standing right in the middle of some really difficult, explosive battlegrounds. We are in the midst of a minefield really, and it is our job to start clearing the mines.

Question: How will you be engaging with government and Parliament?

Trevor Phillips: Not everything we do is going to be about legislation, although legislation is extremely important to making sure that equality is adhered to and that we have the powers to make people do the right thing.

But I think more broadly than that, some of the big policies issues in education and health and the way that public sector institutions work, are the province of government and we are going to be pressing government to live up to its own standards.

The political parties must also live up to the standards that they preach. For example, we know that minorities, women and disabled people are under-represented as members of parliament and councillors, so we will be engaged with politics directly.

But we will be trying to bring all those who are decision-makers into this debate. So of course we will be working with parliamentary champions, but we will also be working with ministers very closely.

Question: Is having Harriet Harman as the equality secretary a good thing?

Trevor Phillips: It is the first time it has ever happened and I think it is a good thing. It is important to have a voice at the cabinet table.

Question: And it is a new government, do you feel you are on the same page as them?

Trevor Phillips: Governments always want you to think you are on the same page. I think we are going to judge them by their actions, not by what they say.

Question: Are government and Parliament doing enough to put their own houses in order on equality issues?

Trevor Phillips: I think we are a long way from where we were 20 years ago, but we are not where we should be. So we will be giving them a good push.

Question: What is your take on talk of a 'British Bill of Rights'?

Trevor Phillips: We are happy to engage in the debate on a British Bill of Rights. We think that the whole argument about human rights has focussed on what happens in the courts in a small number of cases and on the Human Rights Act itself. In our view there is absolutely nothing wrong with the Human Rights Act, we don't need to interfere with it and we don't need to muck about with it.

It may be that there is a British Bill of Rights which is built on the Human Rights Act which would help us develop those ground rules for a fairer society that I have talked about.

But the place we are not going to start from is that there is something  wrong with the Human Rights Act. What we want to do is take the Act and all the other human rights instruments to which Britain is a signatory, and think about how they work and whether we can do better with this framework.

The first task is to get the public to realise that human rights is about something much wider than the very narrow account of it given in some of the 'red tops' at the moment. For example, it is about the rights of children, the elderly and anyone who is in the hands of bureaucratic authority.

The Human Rights Act is the instrument that protects us as individuals against over-mighty bureaucracy, even if that means us as individuals being able to hold our local authority to account and not having complaints brushed off.

Question: How do you change public opinion on that?

Trevor Phillips: I think there are a number of things we can do, not least highlighting and giving support, and I mean funding, to those for example who are using human rights to campaign to get local authorities or local hospitals to treat people better.

So once you start highlighting those cases and campaigning around them, you get people to understand that this isn't about bad people using a strange foreign law to frustrate decent folk. It is about protecting ordinary people who may not have the personal power or the resources to resist authority being used in a bad way.

That is something that I think British people really respond to. Nobody in this country likes bullying, and a human rights culture is one of the ways we can protect people from being bullied by authority, bureaucracy and so on.