Parliament is hiring new diversity managers on almost £70,000 a year – despite the Government ordering the Civil Service to scrap such roles.
As reported by the Telegraph, the House of Lords and the House of Commons are both advertising for new “inclusion” jobs. Half a dozen quangos and arms-length bodies are also actively advertising for equalities staff on big salaries funded by the taxpayer. The report continues:
The Lords is inviting applications for a new head of inclusion and diversity, who will be paid a salary of £57,500 to £68,500 a year. According to the advertisement, the role will involve leading a three-strong team of inclusion officers “with a mixture of working from home” and Parliament.
Meanwhile, the Commons is hiring a senior inclusion and diversity manager on £56,180 to £66,497 a year who will have “a focus on race and ethnicity”. The advert states: “You will have responsibility for leading and developing our race-specific work but will be working across all diversity characteristics.”
Both roles are replacing existing staff members who are leaving the same position.
A parliamentary spokesman said: “Parliament is independent of Government. As such staff of the House of Commons and House of Lords administrations are not civil servants, and guidance provided by Government doesn’t apply in this instance.”
Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor, has ordered Whitehall to begin cutting diversity roles as part of a drive to shrink the Civil Service back to its pre-pandemic size. He called for an end to the “box-ticking” culture and expressed concerns that the focus on equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) was hampering productivity.
But despite his instructions, issued last October, a number of Government agencies and arms-length bodies are continuing to recruit for diversity roles.
The DVLA is advertising for an equality and inclusion specialist to “drive diversity initiatives”, based outside of London on a salary of £40,808.
Meanwhile, the College of Policing, an arms-length body of the Home Office, is hiring a diversity, equality and inclusion adviser on £33,573 to £42,115.
The Disclosure and Barring Service, another Home Office body, is recruiting a head of strategy, planning and inclusion on a salary of £53,400 to £62,000.
At present, the Prison and Probation Service, the Intellectual Property Office and the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman are all also advertising diversity roles.
Worth reading in full.
Contrary to the popular slogan that expenditure on EDI roles and training schemes is ‘just good business’, the FSU’s latest research report reveals that it operates, in effect, as an ‘EDI Tax’.
According to a survey of a representative sample of UK workers undertaken on behalf of the FSU, many ambitious employees and senior managers are now leaving companies because of the excessive time they’re expected to spend on these courses. Ironically, they prove most irksome to those they purport to benefit, i.e., members of the LGBTQ+ community and ethnic minorities.
Given the extent of self-censorship revealed by our research report, The EDI Tax, many UK employees are also thinking twice before contributing to workplace conversations. Genuine diversity of thought is of course required for any organisation to succeed – but in the NHS, where patients’ health is at stake, encouraging a culture of silence to creep-in risks materially affecting the quality of care and treatment on offer.
These research findings are consistent with the report of the Inclusion at Work panel commissioned by the UK’s Minister for Women and Equalities, Kemi Badenoch. Following interviews with 100 people representing 55 organisations, the report noted a “lack of accessible, plain-language, robust data on the efficacy of D&I [Diversity & Inclusion] interventions”, as well as a lack of evidence that these interventions were effective in achieving their purported objectives.
In December 2020, the government’s Behavioural Insights Team came to a similar conclusion in its review of unconscious bias training. The Written Ministerial Statement accompanying that study noted that, “Despite a growing diversity training industry and increased adoption of unconscious bias programmes, a strong body of evidence has emerged that shows that such training has no sustained impact on behaviour and may even be counterproductive”.
