Whitehall’s army of 180 diversity watchdogs

WHITEHALL mandarins have been criticised for wasting money on ‘non-jobs’ after it was revealed that at least 180 diversity officers are on the payroll across nine Government departments.

In a series of parliamentary questions, Tory backbencher Neil O’Brien asked Ministers how many members of their departmental staff had ‘one or more of the words “equality, diversity, inclusion, gender, LGBT or race” in their job title’.

Top of the pile was the Cabinet Office with 66 such employees, which included 41 members of the Government Equalities Office.

However, further staff within the department are likely to have equality, diversity and inclusion responsibilities within their roles, without it being in their job title.

Previous job advertisements suggest that senior staff in these positions could expect a salary of about £70,000 – nearly three times what a student nurse earns.

Duncan Simpson of the TaxPayers’ Alliance said: ‘This is what happens when Whitehall chiefs rush to be right-on.

‘It would be far better for every taxpayer if mandarins focused on rooting out waste, rather than obsessing with identity politics and growing the number of non-jobs. Sensible Ministers would do well to cut the number of these culture wars commissars.’

The Ministry of Defence had the second highest number of diversity staff, with 44. The Ministry is currently seeking a diversity and inclusion director who will be paid £110,000 a year – more than is paid to an Army colonel who commands a battalion of 800 soldiers.

Civil servants have been wrestling with diversity issues in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests this year.

In June, the then Permanent Secretary at the Department for Education declared he would work on ‘tackling the whiteness of senior Whitehall’, while his equivalent at the MoD wrote in an email that ‘Systemic racial inequality… has deep roots within UK society, including Defence’.

Staff at the Department for Environment have been told to educate themselves on concepts such as ‘white privilege’, ‘intersectionality’ and ‘microaggressions’, while a member of the Cabinet Office had to apologise for using the term ‘whitelisting’.