Ernst & Young leads drive to set UK equality standard
Ernst & Young (E&Y) has launched a new National Equality Standard (NES) developed ‘by business for business’ that is expected to go to market in early autumn.
Led by a former director of diversity for the London Development Agency, the NES initiative currently operates as an E&Y subsidiary with a number of sponsors and a board. Achieving the standard will involve a detailed assessment and the payment of a fee based on company size.
A pilot of the standard is still underway and portions of it are still to be finalised, although a launch dinner was held in May at the British Museum. The standard’s chief executive officer Arun Batra told Recruiter: “We are probably 90% there but we are very keen to ensure that we let the pilot process run its course and, before we go live, have agreed on the final set of criteria.”
He went on to say: “We have got to be entirely satisfied that we’ve got it right. There will be some very contentious issues that we will be auditing against, such as equal pay. We want to ensure that our assessors will know the right sort of questions to ask, and, more importantly, that the benchmark for success is correct.”
The NES marks the newest effort to standardise and assess organisations’ equality practices, a consideration that has increasingly become important to those seeking to do business with public sector organisations in particular. The UK’s six equality strands are race, gender, disability, age, religion & belief, and sexual orientation.
Gareth Headley, spokesman for ClearKit which advises organisations on recruitment and disability issues leading to the ClearAssured certification, described the NES to Recruiter as “a fairly broad sweep of actions” to cover all of the equality strands. Companies requiring specialist help for specific strands would still use specialist services of, for example, ClearKit for disability, he said. Of the NES, he said: “We say ‘great, excellent’.”
Batra said, “This is the first time that businesses have come together and said, look, we need to set the standards for ourselves. I think that’s something to really celebrate.”
