The Daily Telegraph - Features
Civil service diversity is a waste of time – and taxpayers’ hard-earned cash McVey made two crucially important points. First, that the benefits of these endless DEI campaigns, programmes and incentives are “unproven to say the least”. Which hasn’t matter
It’s hard to keep a straight face when reading the words “common sense minister” in a headline. Are we really at a point where Cabinet ministers are needed to represent and enforce basic, positive, human attributes? Have we lost sight of those attributes to such an extent that we need a physical embodiment, Mr Men-style, for things like “logic”, “integrity” and “resilience”?
The answer, sadly, is a resounding “yes”, and yesterday “common sense minister” Esther McVey took a major step in delivering on the promise she made six months ago – when the veteran Tory MP was given the unofficial title in Rishi Sunak’s Cabinet reshuffle and vowed to “ensure all parts of the public sector embrace common sense instead of political correctness”. Yesterday, McVey took aim at the flabbiest, feeblest and least common-sensical of those public sectors: the Civil Service.
Over the past decade the supposedly impartial body that describes its core values as “honesty, integrity, impartiality and objectivity” and its core aims as “setting direction”, “engaging people” and “delivering results” has become a shell of its former self, so focused on empty woke ideologies and evangelism that it seems to have forgotten who it is there to serve, let alone the results it exists to deliver.
Enough. In her speech yesterday, McVey announced a ban on the civil service jobs dedicated to diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) and an end to the money wasted on “woke hobby horses”, warning that the public sector must not become a “pointless job creation scheme for the politically correct”.
That ship has sailed – although better late than never and we can still turn it around. We’re talking about a sector that employs an estimated 10,000 diversity officials with an average salary of £42,000, putting the annual cost of those evangelicals alone at £557million. But if you were looking to join, say, a “menopause network”, a “vegan and vegetarian network”, or a “cross-government introverts network”, the Civil Service was the place to go.
If you wanted to spend your days immersed in “gender pay audits”, “unconscious bias training courses” and “equality impact assessments”, you’d come to the right place. And how gratifying it must be to have such lofty focal points? After all, who wants to get bogged down with benefits and pensions or the running of employment services and prisons when you could be spending public money on defending the rights of vegan chocolate and building “a supportive community” that helps bring introverts out of themselves?
Detailing how new guidance on third-party expenditure also means that officials will be banned from spending their department’s budget on external DEI campaign groups, experts or consultants,