Mick Hartley

Interesting. From the Telegraph:

At least 500 civil servants are employed across Government to police and develop diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) policies, The Telegraph can reveal.

Some Whitehall departments have seen the numbers of staff whose jobs involve overseeing equality, diversity, inclusion, gender, LGBT or race policies double in the past year since Labour came to power.

The figures have only been extracted from Whitehall after a two-year battle by the MP Neil O’Brien, who used freedom of information (FOI) laws and parliamentary questions to counter attempts by officials and ministers to block the release of the figures. They are an underestimate as some departments have still refused to answer.

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) alone employs 77 staff who have job titles that include the words equality, diversity, inclusion, gender, LGBT and race. This is ostensibly the biggest number employed in any single Whitehall department barring the Cabinet Office, which has a central co-ordinating role for DEI policies.

Dominic Cummings may have been something of a disaster in his time as Boris Johnson’s whizz kid with the big ideas, but he had some good points about “the blob”, and the need to cut down on the bloated civil service.

There are now 180 staff in the Office for Equality and Opportunity – formerly the Equality Hub – which leads Government policy in this area and is based in the Cabinet Office. This compares with just 28 staff that it admitted it employed with DEI, gender, LGBT or race in job titles as of December 2023. Outside of the Cabinet Office’s central equality teams, there are around 330 DEI staff, bringing the known total to 510.…

Assuming an average salary of £55,000 for each civil servant with a DEI or similar role, the pay bill for the 510 staff would be at least £28.1 million a year.