Virtually all white senior staff within Public sector, report reveals!

A powerful report delivered yesterday by Trevor Phillips with his Green Park consultancy into public institutions In the main if refers to the big and very powerful public bodies which are falling behind even the private sector which has never been a standard bearer for equality and diversity.

We all must welcome this report.

We have often celebrated the great success of our community in areas of national and local government, but what about the public sector? Our communities should be shining in all areas, but recent research by Green Park has showed that there are only six non-white people in the top 268 leadership roles outside government and local authority.

These figures show the lack of diversity in prominent public bodies like the Bank of England, the BBC and NHS. Whist state bodies have a legal obligation to promote equality and diversity within their staff; many of these organisations simply don’t have accurate figures on the level of ethnic minority employees they have.

Trevor Philips, who has worked with Green Park on this research, said:

You cannot have a strategy to deal with this if you don't understand the scale of the problem. That's why the legal obligation has not worked. Then you have the response of organisations. I was concerned when the BBC lost two of its top black managers; it announced a proposal for a diversity training scheme. That might produce a leader in 2050 but what do we do until then? What's not happening is a pipeline that is going to deliver a leader."

The fact is in business and places like the City the colour that counts is green not brown or black. If you are a talented person who can make a business money then that appears to be overcoming the traditional discrimination or cultural inertia at the top."

Research also showed that whilst the FTSE 100 Firms suffered as ‘diversity deficit’, they were still doing better than areas like London- the most diverse area in Britain, who had a lower proportion of visible minority executives than the FTSE 100.

Action needs to be taken, to allow our communities' talented individuals to flourish in all sectors. Money should not open doors for you, but talent and hard work should. Philips has called ministers to learn something from the United Stated, who a decade ago passed a ruling requiring every football team looking for a new coach or manager to interview at least one minority candidate as although 40% of their players were black, they only ever had 7 coaches from a minority. However by 2013, 17 teams had either an African-American or Latino head coach or general manager. Those are results!

Phillips said:

The public sector could learn from this. We should adopt it and go further by forcing selection boards to have one member to be from an ethnic minority."

Parties have proposed ways to tackle the barriers ethnic minorities face, but mainly speak about the Civil Service. Labour has proposed that they would set new targets for the percentage of black and minority ethnic employees and for women in the senior civil service. Whilst the government have published a ‘Talent Action Plan’, which sets out steps to remove barriers which talented people face and have also commissioned new research, to examine the specific obstacles faced by those from ethnic minorities, will these plans give us results?

By encouraging and demanding that organisations interview at least one minority candidate for top roles, and forcing selection boards to have one member from an ethnic minority can make a change, we need to give these bright minority candidates a chance, the government needs to start making a change.

http://www.green-park.co.uk/diversity/

Roshni Vekereya